


VACCINE

by BetterBeMeta



Category: The Legend of Zelda, The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Bondage, Character Development, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Femdom, Oral Sex, Porn With Plot, Vaginal Fingering, evil guys becoming slightly less evil guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-09-29
Packaged: 2018-02-19 05:05:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2375681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetterBeMeta/pseuds/BetterBeMeta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ganondorf is surrounded by unknown plots and a suspicious lack of resistance to his rule of Hyrule. Between the new duties as true and rightful King and his compromising relationship with the cunning Zelda, he explores forces moving in the shadows  that threaten his downfall… and the force of the shadow he himself casts as King of Evil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I

Princess Zelda was as constant as the furniture. She was a fixture, as the weeks drew on into months, and the town below grew increasingly anxious.

“They’ll function without a regent, but not forever,” she said sternly, part of a treatise she’d made every day sometime after morning tea and before noon.

Not that Ganondorf observed such frivolities as morning tea, but he wasn’t one to argue with a barbarian Hylian schedule.

Ganondorf ignored her. He had been ignoring her, and she was right. Which made it worse. Instead, she hovered like a schoolteacher in the library’s study, just out of reach and with impeccable judgement.

“Thank you, though, for conjuring more for the larder. But my subjects will be alarmed to find their grain, their cows, and their vegetables vanishing. Please allow in the ordinary arrangements. There’s book-keeping and their fees must be paid.”

These were the sorts of things a King did. They were not things that Ganondorf necessarily wanted to do. This was not the King he had wanted to become. Not a king of glory, a king of power, but…

“There are rules. Please consider them.”

She had practically leaped off the throne and handed it to him, Shockingly, there was already a document drawn up. Ganondorf was wary to trust such an act of reverse psychology. But what could she gain by giving up?

“Please open the castle to the town,” said the Princess Zelda calmly, evenly. She had asked this question every day since his private coronation. “They will want to meet their new King.”

That was a new concept following the familiar plea. He’d dismissed her arguments long ago, but this one had an interesting bait on it, obscuring barbed hook. “They will not want to meet me.”

“Then you are not a King at all,” sniffed Zelda, “and to be one is what you wanted, correct?”

Ganondorf pressed the quill nib flat, shivering it and spraying black ink over a would-be declaration of dominance. He hadn’t handwritten so much in two hundred years, and all of it was ruined now. “You know well this is not what I had in mind.”

“And what would you do if you did find the Triforce? Do this, except with somewhat more gold?”

Ganondorf sneered at her, lip curling like the snarl of a wild dog. “You have so little imagination,” he scoffed, and gathered a new sheath of vellum. With a flick of his hand, the bone pen snapped back as it was before, and he lettered once more.

“Please, you have no idea what you’re doing,” said Zelda. “And you should have killed me before showing me such atrocious handwriting.”

He stood, yet somehow even as she looked up at him, there was no imbalance. Men had been shrunk to children under his looming frame, and here the Princess stood, unkillable and unshakable, as if her smallness was due to the sureness of the universe and equal in measure to his hulk.

She razed him with the cut of her frown.

“I have been King longer than you have been alive,” he said angrily, bile and fire rising in his throat.

“By your own definition,” said Zelda. “You have been a King, but you have never truly ruled. Not in this age, and not over my former subjects. You are ill-suited to it. I ask you again, is it what you wanted?”

Ganondorf was not pleased.

“Or was the thing that you wanted something else, and only you would call it being ‘King?’ Because even with the Triforce, all you would be able to do is convince the world of your legitimacy. To be King of my kingdom, you must do all a King must for my people. “

“They will not recognize me as legitimate,” said Ganondorf. “and I don’t care for their judgement. You know this, I shouldn’t have to explain this to you.”

“You have not ever explained yourself,” she said.

Ganondorf opened his mouth to argue, and then closed it. Zelda became an extension of the castle again, and did not speak more that day.

\--

The oddness of this particular iteration could not be denied. It had been coming along so well, even, before it had gone strange. Any time when he was reborn into the world with all his limbs, all his brains and sense, appropriate and ordinary appetites, the correct amount of hair, a lack of non-human body parts, and a fairly good-looking chassis was a good time, and being sound in himself was something of a minor blessing after a few really unfortunate returns he’d had before.

(He still refused to consider the instance where he’d been left short some common decency and exactly half of his fingers and toes.)

Ganondorf surveyed his oddly empty castle with satisfaction, but unease. Yes, it was nice to win. But it hardly should have been so easy.

No, it had all become irregular when he had stormed the castle only to find it already evacuated, save for some essential staff and an oddly obliging, if watchful Zelda. She inhabited Hyrule as an owl might inhabit a belfry: silent on the wing but with a loud voice in her nest. She offered no resistance, but even now remained to watch. To disconcertingly watch.

Ganondorf turned from the study’s far corner. If he had not noted every movement of hers, he would swear she was stalking him like a sort of prey. Only that she never seemed to follow him. Half of every room he chose to enter, Zelda mysteriously already inhabited.

She spoke to him only once a day, and was stern. Beyond that, she was like an unwelcome fixture. A passive-aggressive divan or chamber lamp.

But beyond her reproachful stare and the hushed fear of servants that Ganondorf could have replaced at any time with far-more-useful stalfos, there were hardly any actual hylians trapped inside. It almost rendered the sealing curse he’d placed on the door useless, if there still wasn’t things to keep out.

“Where is the Triforce?” he demanded, for a hundredth time. Zelda did not answer, and merely continued to stitch in the corner of the salon.

Ganondorf spoke over his own book. It was a book he had read before, and was not fooling anyone. He’ considered torture, but he doubted it would be any more effective than a simple demand for someone like a Zelda. She could merely remove her own mind or soul, and feel nothing. Unfortunately, asking questions repeatedly like a school-age child was not especially effective, either.

“Damn you. Answer me, for once. What have you done with it?”

“What would you do with it?” she said evasively, entering the same conversation as the day previous.

“Rule this kingdom,” he said as if it was obvious, because it was.

“You already do,” said Zelda. “Why do you need it?”

“It’s not the same,” said Ganondorf.

“How?”

Ganondorf had never actually really held the kingdom of Hyrule without at least knowledge that she kept to herself a piece of the Triforce. He had his own shard, but the unknown locations of the others were a disaster waiting to happen.

Ganondorf looked down at the pages of his book in fury, and thought on how odd this iteration was, and how this waiting compromise was no safer than active resistance. In fact, it was less safe.

With an unwilling castle and kingdom, he could move his army into the city for barracks. He could rubblize towers, and remove paths and doors where he wished. He could properly defend himself from intruders and interlopers. It was rarely successful, but this time only a strong ward on the castle doors prevented entry.

Ganondorf turned the page and read nothing on it. The other, unsaid reason of why the Triforce had to be found burned in his mind. So long as even one of the pieces existed outside his control, it could oppose him. Could defeat him. Could kill him, despite immortality and permanence granted to him.

But he did not say this to Zelda. She obviously knew it. In her eyes and her taunting aloofness, she knew it and lived it. If she was a fixture, she was a clock. She ticked down, and each measured stitch in her linens counted threads to his destruction.

Of this, Ganondorf was sure.

\--

Fear was something Ganondorf had been told to hide, had seen fit to hide, and found it vital to hide at every stage of his life. For all purposes, the self-proclaimed King of Evil did not seem to display or even feel fear, anxiety, worry, guilt. These were weak things, things unbecoming of one of such vast status.  
  
This did not change that Ganondorf, despite it all, was quite a fearful man.

The view outside a darkened window below was narrow, just-slitted shutters cracking starlight through the gap. There was a town below, smoky with banked fires and studded by lantern light creeping tiredly up and down streets, ferried by the night watch.

Ganondorf was afraid, in some ways, of that town. The drawbridge was up, and the humming mirage of his magical wall bisected the moat.

Often, their approval was a nonissue. When Hyrule was unwilling, the town merely was an obstruction to be swept aside en route to the castle. To be tyrant was to be unloved, and Ganondorf had made a bloodthirsty peace with that fact.

Approval was more of an issue when confronted by a mostly-dead monarch and a contract of succession in print naming him rightful heir to Hyrule’s throne. Logically, he shouldn’t have worried. Why not sweep them aside again, as ever?

But Ganondorf, in the tiny hours of the morning, knew that at some level, he was actually somewhat of a cowardly man.

The truth was this: Zelda was correct in that this fate was not what he had intended to happen. But Zelda was also wrong. This was what he had wanted, or thought he wanted. The rest of it was a means to achieve some facsimile of this when this victory was denied to him.

Only that even with a deed to the throne, a passive Zelda, no Hero to be found, there was still no way he could see to make it work. Without the Triforce to secure his position and wish all opposition away, there was no way to feel safe, to be sure of his victory. Yet, who still moved against him?

Even when, in this impossible iteration he had “won,” it was not enough to quell the sense that this land was not his, that he had to claim it. But what more was there to claim, when even with the Triforce this is all he would wish for? He wondered if he was destined to be the destroyer forever: always smashing his prize to pieces as he reached for more to make what he had gained real and forever… and not the hollow endeavor of a pretender.

No. No, he may at times have been cowardly, but he was not one to despair. If this felt as if it would not work, he would find a way to make it work. Because it had to work.

The bed creaked in protest as he collapsed onto it, and reclined in an unfamiliar, willing chamber. If this did not work, then what was he left with?

The same thing as always, he knew.

It did not satisfy.

\--

This day, Zelda was not furniture. She was actively called upon, in a formal setting, in a proper audience. Infuriatingly, she was less prepared to appear before him than she was to lurk about the castle like his shadow. Or perhaps she did not care as much for it. Or would very much have liked to convince him that she did not care. Her hair was left loose, and Ganondorf suspected her dress was intended for gardening. Or she very much would have liked him to believe he was not expecting it.

“I am not about to pretend this is a court that would live up to your nauseating expectations,” said Ganondorf. “But it is one. Zelda, Princess and formerly Heir of Hyrule, I summon you here today… hmph.”

He paused, as if choking on lemon.

“Enough of that,” he said. “I require your services, and you will provide them, and all will be well.”

“What services would be required of me?”

“I am in need of a menial,” said Ganondorf. “I have no interest in the dull affairs of your fat and spoiled lands.”

“I don’t believe that for a moment,” said Zelda, crossing her arms as the least dignified image of Princess in five hundred years. “You only have interest in the affairs of Hyrule.”

Ganondorf became aware of a strange sound, far below. It sounded like a roll of drums. Or many feet. Soldiers? Here? Impossible.

Zelda was unworried. She must have had something to do with it.

If she was not worried, Ganondorf was not about to let her enjoy his panic.

“Some of the more… trying tasks are beyond my patience to deal with. As you were once condemned to handle them, I give this task back to you.”

“That’s very generous,” she said. “And timely.”

Such a look on her was nothing so much as witchcraft. Ganondorf gripped the arm of the royal throne tightly in protest. There was a reason, he thought, why he did not allow himself to talk much to Zeldas. And, as this one had seemed passive he’d been lax, hoping for her weakness of character to deliver him from… what he deemed was an infuriating age-old perspective.

That was when the doors burst in, fifty soldiers, three officials, and one very capable-seeming Hero swarmed the hall, circling around Zelda with swords, shields, spears, missives and heraldry at the ready. Ganondorf had several monologues prepared. All of them, of course, were mired in villainy and deeds he had not in this life performed.

He would have to write some new speeches, of sufficient drama.

“No, there is no need for that,” said Zelda. “I am quite safe.”

The men, especially the boy in green, looked at the enormous form of Ganondorf, then back at Zelda in a walking dress.

“Please! Do respect my husband somewhat more than this!”

Ganondorf locked his legs to prevent himself from tumbling down like a landslide then and there. A lump of clay wedged his dry throat shut, speechless and all at once utterly gormless and blank in thought. The boy of course had one share of the missing Triforce, where Zelda had hidden her own. Why not let the wretch fight for the kingdom? Why set an army against him only to avert their attack? Why invent such an outlandish ploy to do so? Most of the invading squadron also stared: stunned babies, infants. The Hero himself made an unspeakably undramatic noise.

“What on this earth do you think I would be doing with this man, in the early evening, in such a state of dress, alone, were he not my husband? Are you really so foolish as to intrude upon our wedding prelude?”

Mouths hung open, cattle and sheep.

“Go on! Scat! And put the magic barrier back up while you go! I don’t want any of you walking in again!”

Ganondorf had seen many regiments in retreat. From him, most often. He had never seen a retreat as complete or as hasty as the one before him. He had half a mind to join them. The other half was unsure if to be shocked, or unexpectedly relieved. The one able to conceivably kill him had gone.

Very soon, they were alone again. Very decidedly alone. Ganondorf stared at her smug look, trembling with full scowl and fury behind his eyes. “You. What have you done?”

“I have solved your problem,” said Zelda neatly. “You do not require the service of a menial, but of a Queen. You are now legitimate before my subjects, and all is well.”

Ganondorf did something entirely unexpected then. Shaking with rage, he shed a few actual bitter tears. Before one could bottle them and sell them as miracles of the age, they evaporated from the heat of his skin. How dare she. How dare she invoke that which could destroy him, only to hand him again what he could never achieve by his own will and hand? What he thought he wanted, now that it had been given to him, seemed as alien and unfamiliar as the surface of the moon as seen through mage-glass.

But his deep voice was even as he spoke. “This is going to require a large facade. You didn’t consider this fully, did you?”

“Yes, a large facade,” Zelda agreed. “But no, I have considered it fully.”

“This will not be what you want,” he warned, skeptical of her designs.

“Oh, but it is,” she said, suddenly every bit as serious as those who had came before her.

\--

As early as that night, the facade began. Ganondorf was surprised to learn that Zelda was a veritable crook. She had documents forged months in advance-- months, he thought!-- recording a fictional negotiation for her hand, with words the late monarch surely never printed. But they appeared there in ink, in his hand anyway. Zelda’s talents included forgery.

There was much to learn about Zelda, whom he knew for her cunning, her pointed skill in archery and her strength of will in resisting him. He himself, however, was not a political against which to subvert or craftily infiltrate. Mythic battles did not beget espionage, but epics.

And of course, she had witnesses, and scripts of legitimacy stretching back supposedly two hundred years, and every legal stipulation and whimsy Ganondorf could ever stand. For all intents and purposes, he appeared a foreign noble seeking asylum from a broken and obliterated country, and a long-time personal friend of the late monarch, and highly close to Zelda herself.

There were letters he never wrote. Her accuracy scared even him; her comments on the shape of his letters took on a new mask.

“This will never work for long,” said Ganondorf even as he found his bedchamber invaded by Zelda’s company. He was boggled to see her in a nightdress- not for how much it showed of her (very little) but for how ordinary she seemed, how unlike a nemesis. “One, we cannot openly be enemies in public.”

“On the contrary,” said Zelda, businesslike. “Our marriage is political, and only duties are expected of us now. You are free to despise me as you please so long as you are civil about it; I have long prepared to potentially hate my husband, no matter who they could have been.”

Something about her words was the rub of painful grit, inherently wrong and despicable to issue forth from what was certainly the most formidable of his foes. Zeldas bide their time and wait for their turn but they never resigned to anything. They shaped and guided, even confined, even asleep, even dead. Ganondorf knew better than anyone that Zeldas, especially this particular cutty Zelda, were like master horsemaids- their movements and cues were so subtle that any outsider would see stillness and inaction. Yet the horse leaped and galloped at perfect command. Ganondorf had been ridden against many times in his life, but this time he supposed he was the horse.

“You surprise me, Zelda,” said Ganondorf, wrapping his tongue about her familiar name with a toothsome pleasure that surprised even him. “I had marked you as one for mischief and the hard game. Not for the sum minimum moves required for play.”

If she was perturbed, it showed only in the cold small of her back where it was turned to Ganondorf as she outlined the next day on scrap sheets.

“I don't like what you're up to,” Ganondorf advised from where he reclined amongst linens. “And your light keeps me up.”

She twisted to look at him. Ganondorf was not sure what he had done. But there was relief, not offense in her eyes. It was a look of a woman who would not say thank-you. Granted, all phrasing was unnatural now, he’d cursed her and her kind and her throne for so long. But this was as close to honesty as he could creep.

She did snuff out the lamp, and she did slide into bed by his side, though with a no-man’s-land between them. She perched on the edge of the bed, propped upright by plush pillows. She had not been lying. She was very prepared to hate her husband. If only Ganondorf knew why such a fact sat like a rock in his gut.

He closed his eyes, and slept next to his mortal enemy. Just out of reach; in the unfamiliar bedclothes, her scent stood out to his senses and taunted his whole self. Her perfume faded, into a scent of woman, of human, and rose water she rinsed her hair in, the salt of tired sweat. In the fabric of his dreams, he forgot himself and that royalty after a period, commonly took separate chambers. Her weight was absent by his side. Unacceptable. He felt the wind on his face and could have cursed he was not able to enjoy more than just that.

\--

After the first bath in a month, and the first proper change of clothes in weeks, Ganondorf walked down from the keep. He walked past the serfs and servants that had joined the skeleton staff he had permitted remain. He walked past the open salons, and the public rooms, the kitchens and the halls, the uneasy nobles and the nervous wizards, the scribes, the statesmen. He straightened himself as he tugged open the great doors to the bailey town. The iron portcullis was still down, forbidding passage early in the morning. With inhuman strength, Ganondorf grasped the titanic weight and heaved, lifting it just enough to crane underneath. Such things were less humiliating in private. Ganondorf demanded of the Gods that no one watched him put it gently down behind him. If anybody had a comment or noticed, they did not dare speak out.

Ganondorf felt the early-season air, the smell of smoke from the town and cool Hyrule breeze. He began to walk, past gardens and the castle green. The checkpoint before the city gave him no trouble, not even a word before the guards let him pass.

Hyrule was a strange place where even the most powerful were bound by rules, by done-and-not-dones, and although there was no argument Ganondorf felt the eyes of judgement on him. It was an unfamiliar judgement, even after so much time had passed. But like a new phase of the moon, the judgement upon king was different from the judgement upon outsider. Both questioned, asked “why are you here?” Though the sentiments were reversed; not “you have no right to be in our presence,” but “what right do we have to be in yours?”

It was pleasant, but less comfortable than Ganondorf expected. A part of him warned that it would be very easy to become the thing that had once scoffed at his sun-bleached banners, sneered at his dark skin.

They parted around him, as a flock of birds parted around a hawk. Ganondorf reached as far as the town’s plaza, and there he stopped to think, or at least appear to.

Zelda had said to him, not long ago, that they would approve of their new King. There was no more direct way to gauge this, he had thought, than to simply observe their reaction. But no, now that he thought about it, it was not that simple.

The King he had in his mind, his own supposed role, was the foremost among his people-- and these were not his, were hardly even adoptive. If anything, they would be asked to adopt him. No, a King meant something very different to Hyrule, something he had never been able to grasp. Because of its symbolic nature, king-ness transcended mere role and duties; it was something untouchable, something that belonged in a tower far away from those he would rule over.

It was once close to what Ganondorf considered to Godhood, and had been the center of his aspirations.

To break such a role, he learned, was not done. Sitting on the edge of the fountain, he saw the market stop to give him pause, as if it was an errant child caught in the middle of filching sweets. But Ganondorf was never a man to simply do what was expected of him. And so he waited.

And after a while, they moved on. Many, of course, still stared nervously from time to time, and avoided his gaze. But Ganondorf watched them go about their business.

What, he asked, was actually required of him, as King? There were many ways to find out. Relenting to holding court. Accepting a treacherous Zelda’s advice. But in the end, there was no job that was not better done by oneself.

He produced a small folded leaf of twice-scraped vellum and began to take notes in coal-pen. Trade sluggish. Poor harvest year. Where gorons? Suspicious activity. Inquire into tradesmen. Who is permitted to sell? Stray children.

The stray children were the most alarming part, especially in peacetime. Ganondorf had seen the young of other kingdoms during ancient wars, but never in a casual sense. The children didn’t know who he was. They pinched pockets and bread, oblivious to the unease of their elders. Ganondorf, who had to reach back into the vault of memory to figure out what to even do with children, was appalled; the ancient Gerudo did not have stray children. Only daughters who fell under the care of another sister, an aunt. Stray children were a waste; they would never become future soldiers, craftsmen, book-keepers, or builders.

Ganondorf watched them awhile, and noted who they stole from. In turn, this caused him to notice who the sellers seemed to steal from. A ragged-looking woman begged for spare rupees in the shadow of a balcony, and few paid her heed. Why, he wondered, when there was so much work to be done, and hardly enough hands busy with it?

The list filled up very quickly, and Ganondorf began to wonder: why had none of this been done? What kept the royal family from answering these problems?

Then, he remembered who he was. And his own magic wall. It was because of him that these people had paid. They did not know, but it was he who had prompted such neglect.

The pressure of eyes was reversed, even though he had the title of King and all privilege he could have ever have dreamed of. What right did he have, to be in their presence, when he had stolen so much of it by simply acting as he saw fit?

He shook it off. Such things would have to be resolved by the content of his rule, even if his prelude had prompted it all.

\--

Ganondorf tugged at his collar when there was a minimum of people looking. But escaping the eyes entirely was out of the question. With luck they’d all be busy staring at his chest, considering all of them were far shorter than he was. But as King of Hyrule, Ganondorf was unlikely to enjoy privacy.

As King of Hyrule. On the throne of Hyrule. Ganondorf cursed that he was sitting. No, they’d all have been staring at him. There was going to be new collar-related rumors and gossip within the hour. Zelda was impeccably silent, but Ganondorf could feel her judgement, too. What garbage. The lot of it.

Hylians, he had long experienced, were creatures of habit and protocol. Their rituals of ascendance-- coronation, marriage, funeral, were important. But as important were those other species of ritual that seemingly reinforced or affirmed those rites of passage. It had been a long time, but Ganondorf did faintly remember celebrations of the long-gone Gerudo-- similar concepts. But not the same in context.

This was not a celebration. It was more of an extended business opportunity, and an avenue for various figures of lesser power to declare allegiance and congregate to refresh old promises and loyalties. With the barrier finally dissolved and the unthinkably subtle invitations (and who knew there was such political danger in issuing them?) distributed, nobility swelled in through double doors like an overdressed tide: fabric in bright, rare colors and of increasingly daring and pretentious cuts that Ganondorf could not help but evaluate. Those boots-- no, they would be useless if caught in a fight. Exactly what did they do with their hair? What sort of cloak even was that? Why was the universe inflicting such sights upon him?

The tailor was elated to get his hands on Ganondorf’s measurements. Elated at the yardage and fee that he could ask, intimidated at the implication behind the actual numbers. But Ganondorf was, all to be considered, well-dressed and unobjectionable to his own taste. He didn’t exactly mind the customary regalia, a great cloak trimmed in white wolfos fur, the golden crown perched above his own topaz of rank. The rest of it was less important; silk and linen shirts, kid’s-leather jerkin, tailored impeccably of course. Certainly nicer boots than he had possessed before, certainly… a rather more snug style of trouser that Zelda had assured him was very fashionable.

The fabric creaked around his hips as he adjusted his seat. For this, it better have set others aflame with envy.

“Mayor Elto, son of Colin, of Ordon Province,” the herald announced impeccably as the latest live captive approached and swore fealty. An unfortunate sort, clearly of pastoral origin and in the only formal clothes he owned. Ganondorf recognized the cut nearly from the previous century. Taking rare mercy on the aging man, Ganondorf bid him rise and in relief the man took his leave to mingle with the rest of the hosted crowd. There was only a question of minutes before yet another somebody-of-somewhere approached and had to be treated with all relevant stipulations and nonsense.

Ganondorf spoke while he could. “I notice that you do not exactly have the most work in this situation,” he grumbled. His… spouse’s... only duty was to smile and seem queenly. Neither of them actually had seen any sort of ceremony, though their proper documents and even a witness among the clergy had appeared. How Hyrule dismissed the lack of that ritual, was beyond Ganondorf. It was the reality, somehow. Somehow, being cipher for ‘Zelda’s doing.’

“I have enough to do myself,” said Zelda evenly. “Only that it may be invisible to you, personally.”

Ganondorf did not press the issue further. Hylian politics were subtle as a serpent and had twice as many fangs. If the art of smiling just so was of utmost importance, then he would not doubt her. Perhaps this was a presentation for her, just as it was for those who came to pledge themselves to him. For all his own state of overdress, Zelda was positively engineered. Her dress was new, unseen before in public appearance: of daring straight and severe neckline, bare shoulders and displayed elegant neck. More room for jewels. Luxurious furred sleeves hung from her elbows, narrow tailoring on the underdress that hugged her wrists almost uncomfortably close. Tasteful slits in her gown revealed elaborate embroidery on the underskirt. The weight was formidable, for the entire ensemble. And that was before jewelry, and the beaded nets her hair was cradled in. Ganondorf had little reference or knowledge for such a gown, for she often did not exactly fight him in formal attire in most lifetimes, but from what he could tell it was both modest and daring, infuriating yet to be imitated. Her smile betrayed none of this, and was as gentle as sunlight in autumn.

That was a smile she’d killed him wearing before.

It should not have been appealing.

“And, lastly, Regent Salrenherod of Castle Town and overseer of Lanayru Province.”

This was the one that Ganondorf had not been looking forward to. The regent of the castle lands, of course, controlled the immediate area when there was no King or crowned Queen to be found. Ganondorf personally would not like to wake up one morning and find all his ill-gained spoils snatched away by anyone as great and daring as himself, and so he could not imagine this man had much of anything flattering to say.

Thankfully, he was old and took more time to approach than any other sycophant present.

“You have full permission to take advantage of any assistance I may provide here,” whispered Zelda quickly, though Ganondorf resisted the urge to snap back at her that ‘I can help you’ was fine and took far less time to say. Ganondorf dismissed her unfathomable ways, but took note that she apparently could be a resource and recognized this man’s threat as much as he did.

The regent bowed. His joints made a noise too unpleasant to describe.

“I attend, and recognize you, Ganondorf of Western Deserts, as my King until death take you or free me. My lands and children recognize you, and honor you, and the grace of the Queen as well. But…”

And there it was. The infamous ‘but.’ That which preluded only the most tarred and sulfurous of statements: wicked, vile, cloaked by the reassurance that precedes it as a hoodlum goes cloaked under darkness. A ‘but’ that was stark-foolish and naked among its other vocable peers, bold and unashamed of its embarrassment to all who would ever dare utter its single oily syllable taint. The frontman for such thefts as, “I do not think all Gerudo are untrustworthy but,” and “Gorons are not stupid creatures, but…” it was the bloated and grinning mastermind of the violence of, “Women may do as they please, but…”

“But I do confess I do not remember your presence before this day, though I’m well assured my friend, your late predecessor, did keep regular correspondence. To what do we owe the fortune of your meeting, engagement, and overall-quiet marriage with my own godniece the Queen?”

Such a question would not have been tolerated by the onlooking crowd if the speaker had been a few years younger, or the question even slightly less valid. Ganondorf did not exactly panic, but he had not manufactured an answer for this sort of shenanigan and had not anticipated such a line of questioning. Perhaps assuming that all men held his same values had been a mistake, for Regent Salrenherod cared for things far more inconvenient than control of land and victory on a throne.

Then, Ganondorf saw his alleged wife the queen do something he had not expected. She rose, great weight of furs and fabric and tight boning rising with her. It was a silent threat, a shame, that she would take such lengths to stir herself. Zelda did not bid this man stand, but instead was tall and straight before him, at Ganondorf’s side, with a look to punish even the most errant child. Or, alternatively, an equivalent of five less errant children.

“I hear and acknowledge your question, Regent. Would not that inquiry best be served to me, and not to a gatekeeper of my house? It was mine before it was his, and even while you doubt my husbands legitimacy, you dismiss my own.”

The air was as fragile as spun sugar, but sour with sweat and anticipation and entirely too much disposable wealth in one room.

“I recall that your sworn brother the King was my father. Unless you wish to hear tales of letters that you seem to doubt anyway, you shall address further complaints about my late father’s correspondence habits to me.” Her tone softened. Balm after the switch. “But, I forgive you. These are trying times, and I regret that we have not all been formally introduced before today. You may rise.”

Subdued, the Regent submitted to her, back bent even lower to the ground than before. Ganondorf noted that she was not above beating down an old man, if he bit too close to her hand.

“As for our meeting, I cannot say it was much more than fate,” said Ganondorf, rising to stand very close beside Zelda. “It was, perhaps, a strategic choice.”

What transgressed then was rapid and frantic. “There is only one reason they will believe an unknown noble married into your position,” he said into her ear, even more quickly and softly than he thought possible. “Permit me to kiss you.”

Zelda considered this, touched he bothered to ask first. She risked a look away for only half a moment. “You may, but the scandal--”

“It is not a scandal that I am King.”

And he did kiss her. He kissed her and he needed no mental construct to do so, no ‘pretend she is another woman,’ no ‘do so to further your goals.’ Ganondorf kissed her plainly and, he was surprised to feel, earnestly. It was a torture not to pull her close there, upon her taste, but this was a dramatic, diplomatic, impetuous kiss-- a new sort of fun that heated his blood. Hyrule deserved to be scandalized; it was his pleasure to oblige. Several ladies gasped, a few mutterings of shame and shock, and then it was over.

The Regent had gone chalky and excused himself beyond protocol without being dismissed. No one stopped him.

“Heavens, you are a positively monstrous man,” said Zelda, more for effect than to Ganondorf. “Oh, I must retire now.”

“We shall both retire, and leave celebrations in capable hands,” said Ganondorf, taking her by the arm, fully aware of the implications. He took a sick pleasure in watching court men go cherry red, and their wives half-faint all over the floor.

And of course, they were perfectly royal all out the door. Ganondorf was so royal, he could feel the generations of over-entitled pointy-eared bastards writhing in the royal tombs several miles away. Zelda, of course had been born for the role, but Ganondorf had seen fit to practice this particular form of Hylian snubbery and it was the only snubbery he was good at, aside from a well-placed fireball or a tasteful severed head or two. But this was somewhat more appropriate and cruel.

They did not stop being impeccably royal until two turns down the hall and well on their way to their for-now shared chambers. Zelda cracked first, snorting laughter out her nose in the least dignified way possible. “You complete vagrant,” she accused, choking back tears, “I am to be the talk of society for a decade and three generations of nosy aunts will be telling this horror story to children for years to come!”

“I have heard political sabotage is a common problem when one marries their nemesis,” said Ganondorf offhandedly. “I’m sure you’ll adapt to gossip that you're actually are in love with your husband.”

“They’ll never believe that,” said Zelda, picking up her skirts unceremoniously and flinging them behind her where they’d bunched up. “It’s far too unrealistic. We’ll have to do it again.”

“You’d condemn me to endure a second of your snakebites?,” said Ganondorf, unexpectedly pleased by her banter.

They reached the heavy oak door to their shared residence. It was awkward, but not unpleasant to not part ways here. Only that they had to fight who had to get through the door frame first: Ganondorf and his shoulders, or Zelda with her skirts. Zelda won, and Ganondorf kicked her train in after her to follow, careful not to step on her display of excess. Ganondorf followed, and locked the two bolts after him.

Still shaking with mischief, Zelda did let out a sigh and collapse into a chair. Her dress billowed unbecomingly, with her legs splayed out in a slouching affront to protocol lessons. “Thank you. For what you asked.”

Ganondorf narrowed his eyes, untrusting of her question. “What did I ask?”

“You asked me, however urgently, if you could use my kiss in your ploy. It was a good strategy to shock argument into silence, manufacture an easy story for our sudden coupling, and move of us out of the celebrations all at once. If lewd and ruinous for a decent reputation. But I was not expecting that you would warn me.”

Ganondorf was baffled. He had kissed women in his life before, though admittedly not for several hundred years. And none that were so… of remarkable relationship as Zelda. No, he had entertained and provided for his own people before, and to not ask before acting in such a way hardly was a possibility in his mind.

“Why would one not?” Ganondorf asked carefully, with a discomforted, measured suspicion.

“Well, you don’t exactly ask before claiming Hyrule for yourself, or challenging my predecessors for the Triforce.”

“This is not a battlefield. It’s not as if an embrace is as a weapon, unasked-for before a deadly blow,” said Ganondorf. “It is disturbing that you would think so.”

Zelda considered this. “That may be true,” she said simply. Then she looked at the yards of fabric heaped onto her. “I don’t want to take this off.”

Ganondorf looked at the affront to sensible weight limits on gowns with suspicion. “You must be lying.”

“I want it to become off. I do not want to take it off,” said Zelda. “I don’t even think I can remove it myself. I am not summoning a chambermaid.”

“I could conjure it off you,” Ganondorf offered.

“And conjure my skin off with it? Come over here with your ham fingers and help me.”

Ganondorf appreciated the garment for its engineering at least, but he was somewhat wary of how much boning was hidden underneath. The stiiffness lining her waist could have repelled a blade. It was not a stretch to presume that even had been a design feature of consideration. Seeing no easy way to remove it without instruction, he grabbed hold of the laces in back and--

“Do not even think of ripping my bodice,” said Zelda sternly. “Unlace it like a civilized being.”

Grumbling, Ganondorf located the knots and began to pick at them. It was quicker to unbuckle armor. Zelda held her arms out as he worked, displaying surprising strength for lifting what could have been an entire animal on each arm.

The reward when the overdress slid to the ground with a soft thud was worth the wait, though the pain and snugness of his own clothes began to feel more than immediate. But Ganondorf was nothing if not capable of weathering inconvenience. Zelda’s underskirts had to be unlaced. The stiff-boned bodice unhooked in the back by severe fittings that Ganondorf was not sure were fit for horse tack. But eventually, she was free and left in her shift, and gritty with sweat. She removed her jewels carefully, and placed them in her own locked box.

Ganondorf did his best to shed his own extra layers as if he was on fire. He was dully aware of Zelda watching from a corner of the bed, and then acutely aware of it as he unlaced these constricting and dreadfully fashionable trousers and struggled to roll them down. They seemed to adhere to his skin, and after some very unflattering jumping up and down, he locked eyes with the most engrossed Zelda staring at him..

“What are you staring at?” he said, knowing exactly what she was staring at.

“Nothing,” said Zelda, obviously staring at exactly what she was staring at.

“I see,” he said. “Then enough with your staring and come over here. This is your fault, after all.”

Zelda seemed businesslike as she slid off the bed, over to a half-clothed colossus of a man. She did not dwell upon the abdominal curtain wall before her, certainly not. Ganondorf thought better of her. She was unlikely to, as she quietly peeled the trousers off of him, think of the curve of his hindquarters, or the lines upon his hips. Or as she slowly rolled it down his thighs, to call attention to anything quite suddenly waist height. Zelda, of course, was decent if insufferable as a foe, and had more self control than to entertain any such wandering thoughts.

“That seems painful,” said Zelda, in reference to the state of Ganondorf’s erection, clearly thinking of the aforementioned things. “I’m sorry.”

Ganondorf’s brow furrowed, interested that she would apologize for an organ that did not belong to her. “Such things happen,” he said dismissively.

“You do realize that as your Queen, I would be expected to take care of such a state,” said Zelda, leaning on one corner of the bed. She said this as if it was a missive from the south, or a Goron rock shortage.

“I don’t expect you to adhere to any mad ritual your station demands, should you not wish to do so,” said Ganondorf bitterly. “Such things are why I intended to conquer your kingdom, not inherit it in all its foolishness.”

Zelda seemed to consider this, then twist her lips deeply into a frown. “This is impossible. You, King of Evil and all that is foul that writhes upon this world, find it so easy to let slip a simple and remarkably forward-thinking question in bold-faced public, and I fumble like a spinster in the privacy of closed chambers. Do you think I haven’t had adequate lessons on how this is supposed to go? What will it take to convince you to have your way with me? Do you think me ugly? Do you think this inappropriate? Do you doubt the pact between us?”

Unexpected. Sudden. Suspicious. Dangerous?

His needs ached with excitement at the thought of _dangerous_ most of all.

A smile split Ganondorf’s face, one that reached his eyes and bared his teeth. Zelda froze as her frustration seemed to produce a change in the man: delight? Her presence no longer seemed to be a chore, but an intrigue. “You could easily ask what you want from me, Zelda,” he said, testing the power of her given name. “Your interest is… unforeseen, and I suspect your motives. But overall… it is not unwelcome.”

“You terrible man,” Zelda said, irate. “Pleasure me this instant.”

She stripped her shift off in frustration and cast it to the floor petulantly. Then she seemed to remember herself and crossed her arms in humiliation. “If that would please you,” she added lamely. If her interest was manipulative, this expression was not. There was a sense of sincere shame: of herself, and of her station, of course who he was, and who she was, and a mess of battered protocol knotted into her actions. To see her shrink was less pleasing, when her boldness, the risk of this incursion in enemy territory, had been somewhat more erotic than he’d been aware they could be.

He leaned over the bed to her, and twined one hand in her hair as he spoke, fiddling with it idly. “It would please me,” he said. “I only am not sure where your wants begin, and that which you feel is required of you ends.”

“Where did this come from? You’re the Lord of Darkness,” snapped Zelda. “It’s clear that you have needs, I too have needs, and you ought to have had your way by now. This is a mutual arrangement.”

She seemed very eager to persuade, and anxious about his caution. Interesting. The question of what her game was was almost as… of intrigue… as the fact that she had one. Ganondorf moved against her then, in a way that he knew she was not anticipating.

“Very well,” he said to her.

And it was very well, perhaps more well and too well, when he reached down to her and located a spot of importance between her legs. She looked down between anticipatory breaths, his touch carefully circling a clitoral button. “What are you doing?” she asked, leaning up to crane at him in confusion. Ganondorf froze. “No, you don’t have to stop, but…”

Ganondorf brushed her away as she grasped for his belt area. “There’s time enough for that. Lay back for now.”

And he did not push her down or hold her fast with his weight, but arced over to her neck, lithe as a dark serpent. He enjoyed her there, along the line of her jaw, and enjoyed the sweetness as he worked between her spread legs. There was something about her muted whines and labors that excited him, even as she held them back. That she felt she had to, was possibly a waste. But Ganondorf was overblessed with a healthy spirit of competition, and with wicked vigor his fingers renewed. Her volume increased, to his satisfaction, and she fumbled about at his back, unsure where her own hands should go.

Her nails dug in when she finally came under his pressure, and it was not the most horrible pain he had ever endured.

“Not exactly what I had in mind,” she said, finally coming to bear. “And not productive for you, unfortunately.”

“Less correct than you think,” said Ganondorf, the heat of him pressing into her thigh. “You speak as if we’re through here.”

Zelda spread her legs once more. Ganondorf quietly shut them, as one would shut the door to a particularly overzealous salesman.

“Tempting. But not what I want of you,” said Ganondorf. “I performed as you demanded. Now you are to pleasure me, if you wish. That would be an equal and professional trade.”

Zelda pursed her lips. It was a look of one who understood exactly was on a menu, but was unsure of how to order a dish.

“Zelda, I will not do all of this work tonight,” said Ganondorf. “If you are unwilling, then good evening.”

She threw up her hands and groaned, appalled at his idea of a chore. But she did reach forward to where he knelt upon the bed, and took him in hand. Zelda stared for a moment, at the girth and heft in her grasp-- a novice before an unfamiliar and masterwork device.

“Do I pass your inspection?” Ganondorf said dryly as she seemed to study it from several angles, unsure of how to approach such a problem. “Not particularly standard-issue, or so I have been told.”

“My heart weeps for the men whom you told of this,” she gave it a reverent squeeze, “thing, who then had to go back and consider their own.”

Then, she began to test. Nothing if not empirical, meticulous to the last. Zelda was a woman of dignity, of reason and approached his penile dimensions as one would an unexplored territory or phenomenon. Ganondorf suspected that she did not wish to be caught a novice. She was a novice anyway. But as she felt and rubbed, she did discover a sweet spot below the head, and her focus and the purse of her lips drew him closer. She was, as ever, more beautiful in defeating a trouble before her than in any other light.

He groaned. That seemed to encourage her, and with enthusiasm, her other hand explored other sensitivities upon his torso, his belt, constellations of closeness. Ganondorf, had he been in clearer, less compromised state of mind, would have remembered that this was a mutual indulging of needs, nothing more than transaction. But that was quite impossible as she pulled him closer, down, and into her embrace. She had a particular scent that set him alight, of skin and sky and a sweet nectar he could covet-- and as he finally released, through her touch he could feel his own groan seem to shake the room.

“Oh. I had forgotten this would be sticky,” said Zelda as if the King of Evil’s trembling state of sensitivity and bliss was nothing more than a poor hand of cards. “I believe I have a handkerchief….”

He rolled himself off of her, hot and shaking, and pinched his eyes closed. Affirmations burned in his mind. She is an ally only in the barest sense, and not to be trusted. This was mutual. You have in the past done more with your own people, and there was little more to it. Zelda has killed you more times than she has smiled to your face.

As the aftershock faded, Ganondorf pushed away fancies that this fate was another kind of less-terminal death. “That was… convenient,” he said. Zelda snuffed out the lamp. “I trust your needs have been satisfied?”

“In defiance of every lesson prepared concerning wedding nights, yes,” said Zelda. “And thank you.”

And that was the end. Interesting that she clearly had enjoyed herself more than she’d anticipated, yet seemed disappointed at the outcome anyway. Whatever she’d sought, she had gotten less than half of what she’d came for. They slept, again, separated on the opulently wide bed. Ganondorf’s thoughts faded into thoughts of ruses, and prices, and if he dared to desire more of her. She was a shrewd woman and already had him in her power. There would be more to her he would have to pay.


	2. II

Ganondorf kept the folded book of thin vellum, of notes upon the needs of his Kingdom close to his heart, and appended it where necessary. There was no sense in complete transparency, not when he had so few ways to know Zelda’s own judgement of it all. His notes were written in old Gerudo. While Zelda herself was the only soul that had a chance to decipher his work, and Ganondorf doubted that even she had such memory for long-extinct, ‘irrelevant’ things.

Ganondorf revealed his conclusions to her one at a time, before he sought to address them himself. He did not need her approval, but she would notice the gesture, that he could consider her important, that her input was desired. Zelda was not as easy to manipulate as her ancient fathers, but Ganondorf was keen to try.

The draftsman’s room was uninhabited. Zelda used it when drawing up her own work, her letters, her meticulous keeping of castle books and records. Ganondorf was a trespasser; that she kept said space so ordered was barely fathomable to him. Stacks of paper bound with twine were neat, waiting for her signature or rejection. There was an entire shelf devoted to appropriate seals, ribbons, and varieties of wax. Zelda, as Queen, could have requisitioned a full staff to work her tasks, yet she labored: tireless, yet alone.

“You are aware of the children,” he said seriously. “You must be.”

Zelda calmly finished her lettering, and looked up at him, then nearly turned away as if she had misheard. But her nose crinkled in confusion, the circles under her eyes stark against the too-wan set of her cheeks. “Please excuse me,” she said. “Ganondorf, I have never heard you before mention children.”

“The ones which loiter the town,” said Ganondorf. “I would be surprised if you have not received complaints.”

“Pickpockets are not really my concern,” said Zelda. “Ganondorf, I don’t take you as a man to be troubled over something like that.”

Ganondorf realized that to her, the horror of the age and destroyer of her people taking interest in urchins would be strange. Upon examining himself, he too thought it strange-- strange that he would be untested in this way for so long, that he would never have had to think of such things before. Barren kingdoms hid their children far away from him. The welfare of the Great Ganondorf was ancient and had seen a very long hiatus. Like a missing person, last seen centuries ago, worrying about other, browner children.

(before he had given up, he thought with foreign shame. Before it had become about his lack, over the lack afflicting others.)

“Your inaction is more concerning than my own attention,” said Ganondorf. “You are their Queen of Destiny, or are you not?”

Zelda put her pens away neatly. This may have been threatening, in her strange and uncomfortably passive way. To budge Zelda was a sign of offense or at least challenge. “There always have been the unfortunate in the town below, no matter what alms or charity we may collect to shelter them,” she said. “I am not sure what more I can provide.”

“There were no idle children, among my people,” Ganondorf said, though ‘my people’ was stale on his lips, gritty. “They were at play learning to be useful later. They do that themselves. But the skill they learn in your lands is how to beg, because you provide them with no other alternative. Alms, at times. But nothing else.”

Her face crinkled as she thought on these words, and it was the first time a Zelda had ever seemed to regard his authority in particular with anything but fear, guarded apathy, disdain or an ominous inaction. Zelda tensed when in deep thought, a reflex of composure; the wire of her neck stood out against the neckline of her dress, and her jaw clenched in bit-tongue worry. She had been sleeping poorly, he noted-- she had long moved back to her own chambers, as was custom for a Queen. Ganondorf wondered how long she had not been sleeping in them since evacuating his own rooms.

Ganondorf realized that she sat to avoid his eyes. At a closer view, her own were sunken and dark. Surprising, considering she had come to call at his quarters for several nights previous. She must have hidden her true state underneath art of powder and paint. He had turned her away, after that night of formal presentation. However exciting, the danger of her sex carried an unknown threat in his mind: one he was not eager to face until her scheme was made plain.

“A school, maybe. Perhaps I’ll fund a school,” she said, and yawned widely. She was mortified to do so, and tried to cover it with a hand. “But I don’t know what incentive an urchin would have to attend.”

“Teach something marginally interesting,” said Ganondorf bitterly, “They may come. But write nothing until you’ve had at least a full night’s sleep.”

She froze. Ganondorf did not understand what he had done wrong, until he noted the hand on the back of her chair, how he loomed over her. The effect of his size on the space she had to inhabit. He stepped back slowly, removed his arm from her side, and she almost seemed to levitate out of her chair, the vacuum he left was hers again.

“Are you ill, Evil One?” she asked, confusion embittering her tone more than malice. “I’m not sure if concern seems like you.”

And it was humiliating, because she was all at once correct, yet so mistaken. Infuriatingly, for the same reasons he was mistaken-- about himself. “You know little of what is or is not ‘like me,’ Zelda. No more than I know of your kind. You’re all the same when you strike to kill.”

He left out that finding Ganondorf, King of Evil to care about such things was an adventure for him more than it was for her.

It was an _unfortunate_ adventure, to feel unfamiliar tones creep into the harsh command of his voice. “Do you really think that I enjoy seeing my foe-of-ages teetering around like this? I could easily kill you and find no conquest in it.”

As if to hush him, Zelda offered him her hand, inviting him again within her space after the need for distance. Her expression was unchanged, but her set shoulders had dropped somewhat. “Very well. If it worries you so much, you can have the honor of escorting me to my rooms like an actual gentleman. It is not done to walk alone, at this time of night.”

Ganondorf took it, and briefly in rough fingers noted its smallness was a front for strong wrists and calluses, hidden beneath satin. He had seen her naked before, of course, but one missed such details when faced with a whole, bare woman. Ganondorf subdued the urge to feel the skin beneath the fine stitching, and instead played the chaperone on the way to her rooms.

But to his surprise, she slipped the glove off when she arrived. She curled it in his slack grasp, and looked tiredly up at him. Her smile was so small it was nearly nonexistent. But he’d hardly enjoyed her voice so much as when she spoke to him then,

“You are right that you are a stranger. Despite that, you bore to me something I hardly had considered. I know you at least a little more now, yet I have nothing in return to trade. Accept this favor, at least-- and return it when you later know something of me you had not anticipated. ”

It carried some small perfume of her with it. Ganondorf whisked away such thoughts as she bid him good-night.

\--

The boy was well-trained but unobservant.

Heroes were well-suited in their element. But as Ganondorf had learned, there was more than one element at play and the victor adapted. The boy’s body was not heavy to Ganondorf, as he hefted him over one shoulder in the shadow of Castle town’s tavern. Heroes didn’t cope well, did they?

A Zelda that handed her kingdom over. A Ganondorf that languished as a rightful lord. A Hero with no task, dutiless and drunken in his Queen’s service. Of these three, only one could prevail, he thought. It would not be the boy, and Zelda would not use the boy to bring her own victory.

Cloaked in darkness, Ganondorf found himself home. The long and worn halls of Hyrule’s citadel did little in that regard; they were a conquest and not his element. But here, a blow in the dark and sorcery to come, he was a man of progress and goals again.

It would be simpler to kill the boy hero. Ganondorf was not in this life so crude. Instead, wrapped in burlap, the boy’s sleeping body became a load, and he the King became a porter. A portal of darkness was far too much for a populated district. He’d have to be, for the moment, a thug.

Stooped, his height was eclipsed by the load he bore and shabby clothes and hood he wore. What king would bear a sack like a beggar? The guards let him pass unquestioned, and in the dead of night Ganondorf spirited his would-be killer to an empty house, on the far wall of the walled city.

A murder had happened here--trade guild dispute, he had been informed, he’d been present at the court trial-- only days previous. No one lived here, and no one would dare to call at such an unlucky door. Ganondorf descended, bending under a low stairwell, into its dug-out root cellar. Here, he had drawn the sigils and prepared reagents for a ritual. A ritual! Ganondorf excited himself, ragged in morale from the chafe of kingly duties of a respectable lord. He missed the old sorcery. It was not a thing to practice overtly in front of a skeptical court.

Ganondorf arranged the boy in the proper place, and called upon the shadow and the abyss. The tongues of elder magic erupted from his hands, from his heart, and engulfed the room. Dogs went silent in a mile’s radius.

He could not, after all, use Power to extract this boy’s piece of the Triforce. Wherever Zelda had hidden it, Wisdom would resonate, and his foe-wife would surely be alerted to his actions. No, what transpired here could not become part of her schemes. It had to be the undoing of them.

By the powers of darkness in him,

By hands of demons called in the runes of the underworld,

By the open gate that Ganondorf holds wide,

Into this boy manifest inside,

Hollow the heart,

and split the skin,

Ganondorf reached into the gape of nightmares and sowed into the boy a wayward shade. There was a name for this act, the man-ruin, a profane ritual that shared a victim with an invasive will or spirit. For an instant, the boy was half an iron knuckle, naked without a pawn’s shell.

It was enough to repulse the Triforce of Courage, which only could exist in a whole, worthy host. The golden relic manifested, confused and terrified at the change in its habitat. Ganondorf captured it in a web of ether, and hid it from the physical world of touch and senses. That a parlor trick could be used to vanish away one third of the world’s divinity was Ganondorf’s greatest satisfaction.

Ganondorf looked at the boy on the floor. The creature writhed in fear. How old was Zelda’s chosen puppet? Old enough to know what ale was. There was no reason to keep him in such a state. Undoing such a dire bewitchment was not an easy task, but this he could use godlike Power upon. Seizing the boy, he gathered the burning fire of the earth into one hand and split the spell asunder, tearing the wisp he’d summoned out of the boy’s body in a grip of sorcerous violence. He crushed it under fist, and the sweating youth settled again into ragged sleep.

Intact, and better for it, Ganondorf assured himself. No longer the Hero, for his providence was gone, and no longer a pawn of scheming monarchs. As dark as his sorcery had to be, the boy was now free of destiny and no longer a threat, unchanged and unharmed for the most part.

He would have a titanic ache in the morning. Ganondorf smudged his chalk circles, scoured the floor where the runes had burned into clay tiles, and erased the ritual’s remains with scattered refuse. His debris would appear only to be so much junk. He placed a half-full bottle of wine in the boy’s hands, and scattered a few more empty at his feet. To complete the lie, Ganondorf manipulated the boy’s head under a loose tile to explain the bruise, and swabbed the boy’s clothes with liquor and leftover bile.

What a night the child would believe he had had!

Zelda did not need her Hero until her likely-plan came to fruition. If she noticed the theft then, it would be too late. It struck him, in self-reflection that he could have made a slave of the boy. Ad yet, the thought had not occurred to him. He considered it now. And yet, despite his self of yesterday, he decided against it. It would be a complication. Zelda would notice. Something had changed. It might had been him. He didn't dwell. It would have ruined the moment.

Ganondorf left him there, stealing up to the castle and passing through the locked servant’s entrance with a thief’s sly fingers. No one there saw the King of Hyrule emerge from a disguise: a shabby, hunched porter with a white, fine glove tucked into the clasp of his cloak.

\--

The Queen of Hyrule was suspicious from the very start. Showing up at her chambers in the early hours of the morning was one thing. Another was the grin he knew he wore, he could not help. There was little point concealing himself fully from her. He was a good liar but it was a myth that lies required silence, subtlety or secrets.

“What have you done?” She said, wary and worried. “You must have done something.”

She was not even in her dressing-gown. Fatigue wore her down into the heels of her leather shoes, still laced.

“You will not hide Wisdom from me for much longer,” he said proudly. “But that is not why I am here to call.”

Ganondorf noted her eyes flash left, her posture shift in surprise. His bluff may have paid off. He would have to search the room later. If she had not hidden her treasure in a drawer or her safe-box, her cues were a lead at least.

“You have not been sleeping as I suggested,” he said with exaggerated care, though he masked a tic in his chest, his real alarm at her sallow, starved face and bloodshot eyes. “I thought to check if you were capable of taking advice. Clearly not.”

Zelda turned away, but did not shut the door. She merely stood by her desk, and shuffled the papers on it exhaustedly.

“May I enter?” he asked, the question oddly shaped on his foreign tongue, in his deep voice. It was not a thing he felt important to ask, much of the time. But now was no time to place pressure on such a Zelda. Now was the time to misdirect her.

(and foil her, he reminded himself, she had to be foiled, that was why he would show such concern, after all…)

“If you must,” she said, nearly croaked.

With her permission, he passed the threshold and her room was full of him. He picked her dressing gown where it was thrown over the back of her chair, left by a worried maid in all probability. The satin stuck on his skin, where it was rough enough to pill the fabric.

“You are not a child,” he said. “You can dress yourself.”

She whirled around, with perhaps a greater evil eye than he had ever seen from her when she struck a death blow. Her hair was undone, her lips curled into a snarl, cold eyes pointed like icicles. “You may stop now,” she hissed. “You care nothing for me, or my kingdom. You can stop pretending.”

It was such a stark contrast to her beautiful words and the smile of the night previous that Ganondorf, King of Evil, took a step backwards. He realized that he had become an interloper in her den, in a stage where she had much to defend, rather than a neutral ground.

“I will leave, if you wish, it,” he said as cautiously as he would to the greatest dragons he had ever tamed. Zelda merely pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed, shaking with humiliation and anger.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me,” she said in embarrassment.

But Ganondorf knew.

“If you fear being honest with your emotions, that is useless in the extreme,” said Ganondorf. “I will not play your apology games. Whatever you believe is unacceptable for Zelda, who is prohibited from nothing, express it now.”

She looked at him. She looked at him like he was a mirage, hard to make out and indistinct. But as if to spite him, she began unlacing her dress from the front, and let it fall as she spoke. Her eye contact never broke, as the linen hit the floor.

“Did you know,” she said tiredly, “That already three people consider me a pretender-Queen? That while no scandal can hobble us, the Temple of the Goddesses already considers our union questionable at best? That five men clamoring for me have been greatly put-off by you?”

She sat on her bed, the weight of Hyrule pressing down upon her form. Clearly she did not speak the whole truth, but any facet of it was of note.

“And you do not help anything at all. I am more than prepared to stall your dark plans for my kingdom, but the fact remains that your words have been better counsel than I have ever had. You! Terrible man, destroyer--. I hate you..”

Her nakedness was not a vulnerability. In her room, under her accusations, Ganondorf felt unprepared in a way that reversed the notions at work.

“What do you suggest I do? Sit about and look monarchly while you break your back under a kingdom that belongs to me?” Ganondorf raised an eyebrow. “Direct me, if you wish.”

She paused, considering the fullness of suggestion.

“Pleasure me,” she said, though her statement was a question, unsure at what she would receive. It was a request Ganondorf had been expecting; she had attempted to proposition him for days-- and each time his instincts warned him away from her touch. 

Ganondorf raised an eyebrow. “You’re hardly in any shape for… vigorous activity.”

“What are you talking about? You are the one who will provide the activity.”

He knew exactly what she implied, and was baffled and disgusted. “I am not about to bed a still sack of flour,” he said sternly. “But if your will is set….”

The heat of her spread thighs was muted through leather gloves, but the twitch of surprise at his touch was enough contact for him. kneeling at her bedside, He could feel her aquiline stare. His own view between her legs, he felt, was much better.

Zelda gasped but did not protest as he sampled her, lingering and slow. her fingers clenched in his hair, stiffening in sensation. Tired as she was, her moans were as much a comfort as the sigh of relief they masked.

He had almost forgotten the taste of woman. Sharp, sweet, carnal-- improved in a way, for she was Zelda. At his mercy, but also no duty of his, no obligation, his choice and no greater triumph to feel squirm.

“Not there,” she gasped, scolding his delay, “Higher. Properly.”

Ganondorf only laughed, and bore down upon her, in her greatest sensitivity. She shuddered as she finished, heaving and heavy in his grasp. He traveled upwards to meet her face, found hair askew and tired eyes dulled further by bliss.

“That is a way to kiss a Queen goodnight,” she whispered. “So I will forgive you, this time. But next time, you will oblige me.”

“Worry on your obligations when you are rested,” Ganondorf advised, doing his best to ignore the hot-iron brand at his belt. “You are hardly a worthy challenge to me when you are not.”

He did not know why he leaned in to embrace her then. There was little to be gained, after he had well-satisfied her and placated any possible suspicion about his motives. It pleased him. Her compliance pleased him. He was, despite unsatisfied arousal, a very pleased man. She was asleep before he had long pulled away, naked and cold on sheet covers. He did not disturb her, but threw the voluminous skirts she had shed over her, plucking them from where they lay discarded on the floor. It was more consideration, he thought, than he ought to have given to her.

It occurred to Ganondorf, as he looked upon her, that this was the woman that he was going to have to kill. She lingered on him, though she would soon have to end. Her cries would silence, and be as unresponsive as stone. Defeat was inevitable in any other case.

That was the thought that expelled him from her chambers, sobered him, as he endured the long walk with cramped trousers to his own rooms. He himself stripped off and lay in his own bed, which would one day be the bed of the one and only ultimate ruler of Hyrule.

It would please him, he knew, to see her torment. To see her cry, and in violence cast her from his side at the throne. She would, and likely was, planning the same for him. Her greatest weapon was no more, but she had in some way contributed to his downfall in every lifetime, in every possibility. And yet, to close and eyes and imagine her was the strange solidarity between them, two heirs of an ancient and fatal dance. The reason and interest of her voice and company. Her bare, pale self, the quickness of her breath, and the touch of her flesh. To hold power over her was to imagine her begging for more of his attentions, rather than pleading for his mercy. To hear her scream, in his mind, was corrupted by bliss-- to imagine her growing cold scourged him with frustration.

Ganondorf took his raging cock in hand and angrily ended suspended desires, casting from his mental tower her image, only to find it surface again and again. He did not weep, but roared upon release, a chained and leashed beast, and thought of her until morning torturously came.

\--

There was something useless, yet comforting about the two most powerful magical figures of Hyrule taking a mundane caravan for travel. Ganondorf had no doubt that, if Zelda wished to reveal the true extent of her abilities, she could have vanished herself to the ancient amphitheater and back hundreds of times before their caravan had reached the halfway marker upon the highways. For himself, it was nothing to walk the rifts between dimensions, and close great distances in a mere gesture.

Ganondorf preferred horseback anyway. There were bindings and magics he had invented solely for horses, to make them obedient, to change their properties, to run them tirelessly or through the air or over water or deep sands without need for pause or feed. Even in this far-distant time, Ganondorf was Gerudo at his core, and missed the swift, fine horses of the past more than many people he had left behind in immortality.

But a caravan would do. It rocked and creaked under them, wooden and lacquer seats padded with cushions. But only so many felted-fleece pads could soften the bumps of the road, the ever-present shake of flagstones and cobbles on iron-axel wheels. It would improve when they were forced to cut across fields. But at least he would not be rained upon. And so many servants and retainers! There was no way to carry tents, or more goods than a saddle’s load could carry without carts or a luggage train.

(Unless, of course, one was the greatest sorcerer the world had ever and would ever see, but to flaunt such a fact especially to a fearful and judgmental citizenry was highly unwise and impolite to those who depended on providing such a service, Ganondorf supposed.)

Zelda was reading. Reading, in a caravan train. Ganondorf was nearly sick at the thought. But the woman seemed unbothered, turning a page in her unmarked text. Ridiculous, he criticized of himself. He could fly through the air, if he desired, but thought to retch at the idea of reading on a slow-moving journey. Perhaps it was the luxury that astounded him. To carry books with you, rather than simply essentials, was staggering. Books belonged safely stored, where nothing could jeopardize their valuable and difficult-to-replace contents.

Ganondorf cared far more for books than people as well, more than any supposed desert thief should have, by Hylian judgments. It was a secret he had seen fit to guard carefully before he had made his first great coup of Hyrule. This Zelda had seen him read many times, and had been so callous as to suggest titles.

She knew exactly what effect this had on him, and he cursed her for it. And himself in boredom. Perhaps that was her plan. Here he would wither from sheer dullness and lose his throne to her, and her preparedness. There was not an unloathesome thing about Zelda, he was sure. She turned the page idly, smiling at the new contents. He cursed her again. Not a single thing.

Still… it was a long way still to the ancient amphitheater, the site of a great gathering of free settlements of Hyrule. Not all peoples could make such a pilgrimage to a castle town affirm and be introduced to their new King, and such a political gathering was a literal meeting halfway: on neutral grounds, belonging to no one property save Hyrule itself in commonality. Technically, supposed Ganondorf, it was still his land. But hardly the same as how the walled keep overlooked the castle town. His city. What a thought, his city…

There was no graceful or manipulative way to do this, he realized. There was no way to make his actions anything other than overt. It required more will than approaching her bedside, even. And far more than to suddenly run her through with a sword. Ganondorf switched benches, from the one facing her in the caravan, to a place by her side. His cramped knees found some relief, no longer forced to hunch up out of the way of her skirts.

Hylian queens must have practiced that look, that single icy eyebrow of discipline, for five hundred years. Ganondorf often found his presence to be a dull instrument. Zelda was surgical, slicing his motivations to pieces without a single word. To be rendered awkward was not something Ganondorf was familiar with. But his dignity was something that, in agony, he would sacrifice for the sake of sanity. Once. In this situation.

He looked on to her reading. Nonfiction. Some thick record of plants, describing their uses, their flowers, their properties and leaves. Prints or preserved specimens were pressed with the pages. It was a fairly advanced text on a common subject, and not something of his expertise. Plants and their magics and medicines were for those who lived someplace green, in his past.

Zelda turned the page.

“Go back at once. I was not finished.”

She looked wryly up at him, holding her finger over the left corner of the page, almost as if she would ignore him. But after an overly-amused second, she thumbed back and laid the book flatter for his eyes. “Don’t be long.”

Ganondorf turned the next page angrily for her. He was not a slow reader, even if the characters had pinched somewhat in a few hundred years since his last appearance. She laughed, and while they read there was a strange, idle peace between them. The miles dragged on, and fatigue set in.

She rested her head on his chest. His arm wrapped around her shoulder, to her middle. Her smallness to him was obvious: not a doll or a child but an idol in his hands. A jewel.

If the porter thought much of them when they were found asleep later, he did not say anything. But no one envied the boy who was unlucky enough to have to wake them when they arrived.

\--

Ganondorf had thought and rehearsed many times in his life, before he had to speak. There were kings to manipulate, sisters to assure, monsters to master, and demands to be made. It was not often, however, that his words became highly public. There had been a time when the promises of a Gerudo had been worth less than the dirt they’d ridden in with. There had been a time when no audience of mixed peoples would have ever accepted his authority.

The wide stage before him felt like a fairly malicious prank. Hundreds of years past, these same eyes would have tried to eat him, and his sisters, alive and screaming. Now they deferred to him.

“There is little doubt that Hyrule must address the needs of its people,” Ganondorf said with practiced evenness, though he could not shake the bite of irony in his words. “And that it has gone long without such a reform too is obvious. Kings have continued where kings always have. But just as a roof develops holes without patching, or a mule is spoiled by leniency, Hyrule too must face new questions, find new perspective alongside ancient ways.”

It was a very daring speech. Zelda knew it. He knew it. But damn him if he would become a say-nothing no-worth like the drivel of hundreds of royal enemies he’d faced before.

“It is no fault of a roof that, over time, it is ill-adapted to accommodate. And of course no fault of the mule that it forgets its cues and purpose. But I suspect that all here before me know this-- these maladies are yours, these problems are yours, and are what you look to me to correct. They are invisible to one who dwells far from those with water leaking forth, But not to me. It is true that I am not of the house of Hylia, and do not bear what… marks… of favor they carry,”

He paused. No one had to know what his right glove hid. If Zelda caught the meaning of him, she did not flinch.

“But then again, neither do many of you. Before me, there are folk of the south, of Ordon and beyond. There are Gorons, proud as ever. There are Zora, enduring of much unknown to the life of Castle Town. Perhaps in past ages there would have been more to stand before me. My people too, would have been present.”

“So then, despite that I was not born within a Hylian tower, know I treasure this land as much as you. There is nothing more in this world, or the next, that I desire, than to be king.”

Ganondorf felt it before he realized what had happened. The impact was enough to shake him. A very powerful bow indeed-- an arrow grew from his breastbone, appeared. He looked down, stared at it like an unhappy accident. He had been shot. The archer likely crouched along the low hills over the lip of the basin. Only when the audience cried out in horror did Ganondorf realize he ought to do something about this.

He gripped the arrow’s shaft carefully, and with a gentle twist in the opposite direction, yanked it out of himself. A woman in the front row nearly passed out. There was somewhat of a mess, but Ganondorf was unharmed-- thanks in part to the thickness of his ceremonial shirts and leather jerkin, and in part to the presence of divine Power.

The audience was too shocked to cheer as he stared at the arrow point for a second before casually tossing it aside. Ganondorf continued his speech, undaunted. “If I am an outsider, then many of the most vital inhabitants of Hyrule too are outsiders. If I am unworthy, then so are the unsung greatest of us. That is what I promise to bring to you, with all of my being: that I will rule this kingdom, not in the name of ancient providence, but in the name of those who still survive today. May my Queen respectfully carry on Hyrule’s royal line and traditions, I am yours.” He gestured to the top of the bluff, mouthing a rapid binding spell. A loud yell of surprise broke the awkward pause as an archer fumbled to run, suddenly glued to the ground. “Furthermore, arrest that man.”

The noise afterward was not much like any applause Ganondorf had ever heard before a civilized court of Hyrule. The frenzy of guard of at least two different peoples to collect the fugitive. The riotous approval and cheers of the less subtle audience. The doubt and polite clapping of more reserved parties. Some screaming and panic, “get a healer!”, “such blood!” Some gasps and stunned awe. At least one raving fool proclaiming the circumstances “unnatural” and an “abomination.”

All of these were better, Ganondorf supposed, than having no audience at all. Thoughts of his own words, and if they were sincere already needled him. His mind was a medium; the eyes of his sisters stared up at him, ghostly in the crowd in the empty spaces where they ought to have been. Ganondorf knew what they expected of him. And he was prepared to compromise it.

But as he sat to allow another speaker to take attention, he entertained that perhaps in this cycle, just once, he might play the idealist he once was, before everything had begun. Only to see what would happen. He felt his breached chest, assessed the easily-healed wound left in him. Only to see what would happen, he had to remind himself.

\--

Ganondorf had never slept in a bed in a pavilion before. To carry a hewn bed of wood and a mattress of wool and straw along with oneself on the road was opulent beyond imagining. This was completely an artifact of experience: he could easily produce one and banish it with sorcery, so such a restriction as luggage was hardly an issue. Still, it was not within his nature to flippantly conjure luxuries. But to see the furniture unloaded from the caravan was as foreign as anything in his long, long life.

However, even for a King, there was no privacy on campaign. Canvas walls were thin, though there were screens to form rooms under the canopy. He supposed that it was a relief he and Zelda were supposed to share one bed for the duration of the conference; the wicked indulgence of two beds bordered on obscene.

Ganondorf walked in the dark instead, after supposedly retiring. Seclusion was something he as a warlock could afford at will, and he did not fancy bed rest. It would assure his people, mask his unnatural constitution and resistance to deadly, arrow-shaped afflictions, if he appeared mortal for just these few hours. Perhaps appear in some tasteful bandages the next day? The wound was closed and seamless, lost blood of little matter. He could fake it, he supposed, but to stoop to such a facade was a tax on his pride.

To be King, he had learned, was a kind of shackle as well as the ultimate freedom. How power came with restrictions and obligations and endless endless judgement, that slew him.

Ganondorf looked around, vague scrub and plains trees faint outlines against the dark sky. This area… it had once been something, he thought. Almost remembered. Hyrule had been built and broken, by him and after him, many times and the pieces all ran together in the same midden, digging through over-turned scraps for chronology that hardly mattered anymore. The theater was something, yes. These plains, unfarmed and wild moors-- another kind of field separate from the rolling agriculture of the south and west. This was, he remembered, once a battlefield.

He could feel the sword in his hand here. It had been a battlefield he had breathed, been, controlled. There were too many wars in his mind and they mingled. But he’d been here once. He felt younger now than then, strangely. As if he’d seen the war and now was perching uncertain on its borders: a new thing born of it and now only hobbling about in a strange world outside its scope.

Who would he be, he wondered, what he now was to those people? He had not expected so many eyes, so much adoration (before the arrow), for someone who once never would have had a public word. Were they all liars, deceivers, applauding him now but then never mourning his passing when he inevitably would come to an end? Who among them were traitors? Why would they pretend to approve so?

“Please, you’re much more clever than this,” a voice said unexpectedly out of the shadows of the moor. Zelda, of course. “I did have to make up a good excuse and then cover for your being out of bed. The illusion you employed was flimsy and half-hearted.”

"It’s not as if it isn’t my bed, on my land, in my Kingdom,” Ganondorf said irritably, “Where I go isn’t anyone’s business.”

“I suppose not,” said Zelda thoughtfully.

“How did you find me, Zelda?” It was a command more than a question.

“I prefer to always know where you are,” she replied.

“How thoughtful,” grumbled Ganondorf. “If you’re here to kill me now, you ought to get it over with. There’s no witnesses here, at least.”

“That’s a sudden extreme,” said Zelda quietly. “Is something bothering you? You tend not to accuse me much anymore.”

Ganondorf yawned. It was a great thing, shaking him all over like a lion. “Merely pointing out an excellent opportunity that you will doubtlessly waste.”

“Actually, I like the way you think,” she said, and drew nearer. It was very close in the dark, closer than she had much right to be. She was clumsy, hesitant, but she tried her best: a felt gloved hand cast downwards, cupped over him. “If that’s all right.”

He couldn’t see much of her in the dark, but her meaning was clearer than midmorning. Between a deadly or a tender touch, Ganondorf’s interest grew: alarmingly with little care for which was the end result. Mad, senseless: more lifetimes than an archer had arrows, and somewhere beside the deaths he’d developed a taste for the foe, the aggression, the girl, and the peril she brought. Ganondorf could not see a flush or the twitch of a smile beyond her dimly-lit fingers, the shape of her hair under the new moon-- but her gasp came out round through a pleased mouth.

“You may do what you wish,” he said cautiously, “Though if I do not approve, that will be the end.”

She was already picking at the laces of his breeches, small fingers and fumbling impatience. Ganondorf was halfway to laughing at her inexperience when she finally touched him, and felt the smooth kid of walking gloves. But unprepared, he did not expect to feel the delicacy, the agonizing conservative nature of the queen’s tongue on him.

He cried out. It was silent. Ganondorf almost lifted a hand to his numbed throat before he realized she had done something in the dark, Anticipation had made his notice lax. a force pushed him to his knees, and he obliged, stunned and confused. He reached out to her, only to feel her other finger on his dry lips. Gently.

“Ssh,” she said. “The night watch aren’t far behind me. If you’re really so alarmed, you easily can break this spell.”

Only the most muted groan escaped the trap she had set for his voice, deepening when she set to work. She was somewhat better at it this time, when she took him into her mouth. There was more than she could be reasonable with, of course, but she managed. Zelda knew his sweeter spots, this second time, and Ganondorf trembled under her labors. Rage, somewhat. Humiliation. Shame for enjoying every moment of it.

Pleasant surprise for the newness of it. Half a thousand years or not after his once-duties had subsided, Ganondorf had known many times the pleasure of sinking down into a woman, the scent of her and the response to his touch. He knew their scold, too, when he had learned the ways of providing for them. Zelda was an oasis, in a way, after a long drought-- of new, sweeter waters.

It was surreal to feel himself pour over the edge, grip the tree behind him and split the bark between anxious nails, but not to hear himself heave, the sound of his own pleasure. He shared her reaction, then: he heard her surprise and her amusement, felt her draw close, and the smile of twisted lips on his flesh.

She released him then, and he fell forward onto quaking arms, gasping for breath. Faintly, Zelda pulled her kerchief out, and handled all traces of him. “You level the score, then,” he said steadily. “Then again, I have never known you to let debts go unpaid for long.”

“Debts?” asked Zelda coyly. “You owe me more than you are aware of.”

Ganondorf would have to think on that for the night afterward, and she was correct. At the time, he did not quite understand what she had meant, only that he had not seen fit to deny her, and there was much more in motion than some covert penile manipulations.

When morning came, and Ganondorf blearily turned over on his side of the pavilion bed, there it was: tucked into the laces of his breeches. Invisible in the dark, too thin to be felt in sheets. A tiny, folded note on a bleached linen rag.

_Archer’s shot message for me, not you. My reply was no. But they will force my hand eventually._

Ganondorf’s plans changed. Wisdom could wait. Against his better judgement and aligned with a shameful passion, he made ready to defend the Queen.

Who was ‘they?’


	3. III

Their caravan would unfortunately have to be a decoy, for public show. Ganondorf had far too much to do, after that, to bother wasting a day on the road across the kingdom. The kingdom would know he was an accomplished sorcerer now, though he still twisted in mind to come up with explanation for the great shield he’d once held over the castle itself-- before Zelda had broken it with an entirely altered game. It had previously been unclear and blamed on an unknown menace thus  _defeated_ by Ganondorf. Now suspicions could rise.

Unimportant now. A little jaunt through shadow, prisoner clutched by the neck, and he thrust the man into Hyrule’s dungeons: kilometers away.

“I have made my peace, demon-born,” the archer spat, wheezing where he hung chained. “I didn’t come with regrets.”

Ganondorf cast a large hand across the man’s face, metered exactly in force. An angry welt appeared, but no bones would break. “You owe me at least for the arrow,” he snarled.

“I owe you nothing, brute,” said the archer, “I owe nothing, to no beast and enemy of the free.”

He rose his hand again, considering which part to snap first, when the archer spoke again.

“Hit me harder, monster. Fill the hide you were fashioned in.”

Ganondorf felt his arm fall limp, his mind mazed only for an instant. It was odd, how he had once taken such speech for granted, only now to be startled by it. In this life, no one yet had called him anything but man, anything but King and all he had hoped to be. To lose such regard in the eyes of even one was sore to him, but far more bitter was the lame, dull realization of Zelda’s warning, that the arrow had not been a threat to him, but to her. With every strike he would only confirm his charge’s convictions, tighten his tongue..

Ganondorf resolved, even as his temper glowed like a coal in his chest, to be a man, within a man’s skin.

He loosened the laces of his collar and pulled the neck down to reveal a stark scar upon his dark skin. “I would have to use a rare force to match what you already have let loose from a bowstring,” he said, measuring his syllables with pain. “ You are in no position to call on monsters and beasts, when it was you who did strike first.”

The man did not fall silent but instead bit his tongue, as if he had more to say but withheld his heart for reasons unknown. His look faded from enraged to resigned. The promise of a quick death had come and gone, and Ganondorf supposed now he expected his torture.

Ganondorf instead asked, “What is your name?”

“Don’t you have jailers, inquisitors for these things?”

“That is very interesting, what they call you,” said Ganondorf dryly. “Name. At once.”

“I will not allow you to track down my family,” he said.

“Why?” asked Ganondorf. “Are they better shots than you?”

He could feel the fear rolling off like a sickened cloud, and it was a bitter delicacy.

“No, I think you fear what I could do to them,” said Ganondorf. “It will be easier if you speak now. Your faction’s existence has already been revealed to me.”

The archer’s eyes belied his silence.

“Are you surprised? You shout dogma at me, and then wonder when I hear it for what it is? It’s not as if I haven’t heard your sort before, hundreds of times, heirs of hundreds of other tongues.”

Ganondorf continued on, feeling the rage cool in his chest like a magma flow, leaving heavy, jagged iron behind. “Your benefactors were well aware of my ability to cope with the occasional arrow,” he half-bluffed, mentioning nothing of the Queen. “They meant to make a point to those present that there are those who despise me. You, martyr, shot a symbol into me, that I am a threat worth fighting.”

“And are you not?

“That remains to be seen,” said Ganondorf. “But your words narrow your association enough to at least guess. You know of vague impressions in mythology and your history that you’ve been told implicate me. Your master at least knows of the Church of the Goddess and its teachings-- and legends of past Zeldas.”

“Salenherod,” the man said quickly. “You must know him. Salenherod sent me.”

“I think not,” said Ganondorf. “But not a terrible lie. Castle Town’s regent is known to have been scandalized by me, and has at least one son denied by Zelda in favor of myself. However, he has no allies among Zora, the Gorons, the folk from the south and west. They would not know to rally to him.”

Ganondorf frowned. “It would be… appreciated if you could tell me who has ties to both the church, and to the far provinces.”

“Never.”

Ganondorf thought.

He did not often have to do so and withered for it. He thought as he had not for quite a long time: in wit, in cunning, in every avenue he could take. Already the man seemed shaken, expectant, waiting for the brand, the burning fire, the lash, whatever the King of Evil could devise. He would never overtly speak.

But the man did not have to.

“Then you should at least tell me your name,” he said again.

“I won’t,” said the man. “Please, beat me already. You will, I know it. Why would you want to know such a thing and then leave me?”

“If I do not know your name, it will be difficult to send you back to the family that you mentioned,” Ganondorf said.

“Ha! In a box, you mean.”

“Whole,” said Ganondorf seriously. “And at once, if you prefer.”

The archer himself was shot, invisibly.

“You would not,” he said. “There must be a trick.”

“Tricks are the domain of petty magicians,” said Ganondorf. “I am King, and I have no use for them.”

It was some long pause before the man answered. “Kasuto. I am from Kasuto. That is all I will tell you in good faith.”

“Very well, assassin of Kasuto,” said Ganondorf. “You may go.”

And they were there. Down below, squeezed between two hylian thick-grassed hills was the village. The lights of houses and barns seasoned the dark, lit the roofs and puddled on the surrounding valley until night claimed the the high ridges where they stood. The archer gasped in confusion, stumbling as his hands suddenly were unbound.

“This must be a mistake,” he said, staring as the King of Hyrule stood so close to his own village. “What are you going to do? Burn it as I watch?”

“No,” said Ganondorf. “But tell me which dwelling down below is yours to inhabit.”

He stammered. “I… will not. It’s… over there, somewhere.”

“Very well. Go there,  in peace, and know that I have inflicted no more cruelty to you than a hand across the face in return for an arrow to my heart. Whatever you tell your fellows, remember this mercy. It is not one that they will have known to preach about.”

As if pursued by a phantom or a fiend, the archer ran, and did not look back.

Only a few steps through shadow again, and Ganondorf too did not look back.

He looked forward.

In the palm of his hand, through the mirror-shine of a small seeing-stone, he looked forward upon the unknown archer, and saw the frightened tears of a poor mother and thin son. But of course, he would soon return to the one who had hired or was otherwise patron to him. And, in magic not-quite-dark, Ganondorf would be watching.

Tricks be damned; there was no better confession than action, and Ganondorf was a king of the truth even before he was a king of lies.

\--

Word of the archer spread like fire on the plains.The talk was something Ganondorf knew was impossible to control-- he wanted it that way. There was both a fear and a reverence now, a new sort of respect that they viewed him with. Ganondorf knew that it was a show of power: opposite of the weakness the bowman had meant to display. Even if he had lived, had he been an ordinary man, he would have been seen wounded and infirm.

The court regarded him no longer as an unknown consort to their Queen, but formidable in kinghood. Ganondorf ate their lowered gazes like a ravenous man at a banquet. It was a good fear, a healthy fear.

He turned the page in his small book of vellum, and read his own notes with satisfaction.

But his smile darkened.

He was quickly noticing, sensitized in this strange lifetime, that such regard had a fetid core, even if its rind was sweet.

Ganondorf had learned long ago to keep his ears open; if he could not hear Gods as the Hylians did, he could hear the voices of the earthly instead. To his spies, sentries, and even magical eyes, few rumors were obscure. There were some that said that his resilience was “unnatural.” There were some that said that his sorcery was too dangerous to trust.

They trust the Hylian monarchy with absolute magical power for centuries, and just now they consider a few pitiful tricks to be a threat! The hushed speculation of his appearance, his grand size and prodigious strength, his dark skin and fire eyes-- some doubted that he came from a real nation at all, some even theorized he had been summoned: a demon doppelganger, a false king..

These words, of course, had existed before, been support to the bitter hatred the archer in the dungeons demonstrated. Such factions of dissidents usually were below him. But Zelda feared them. And at the core of his shame, he feared  her. As such, they were not to be dismissed.

For the first time in his life, such speech felt more like an offensive accusation than accuracy. The invasion of his usual reputation on this for-the-most-part-enjoyable interlude was less than welcome. There were times when Ganondorf felt as if there was the King of Evil that stood in his footsteps, with hands gripping his neck and his wrists. Where he went, this other self followed. It was a strange relief to feel separate from it, lpulling free from his own skin to breathe fresh air. But it never lingered far behind.

In his glass, Ganondorf turned a sleepless eye to the kingdom. A magic view was as good as any-- and as silent and still after dark. The town market rested, abandoned. The temple district was asleep. The courtyards of the keep had doused the lamps. The guardhouse loomed in its tireless presence. Even the archer, still remiss in reporting to his masters, settled down to bed.

In interest, Ganondorf chose to trace the would-be Hero that he had waylaid, months prior. That “Link” that now sat idle, Evil King on the throne.

In further interest, Link was not in the bed he ought to have been.

With only minimal dread, Ganondorf spied in his glass that Link was in Zelda’s private quarters. His first, territorial thoughts he restrained, outrage reined-in to see no comfort in the woman’s eyes as they noiselessly spoke. Neither made contact, Zelda’s posture closed and her eyes stone-set in hollow composure. Ganondorf did not see the young man’s face, and as he tilted the oblong crystal in one hand to see, the boy exited the room. Zelda sat heavily, and began unlacing her overdress one mechanical tug at a time.

Had she called upon her assassin, finally? And she must surely have noticed where he’d stolen his share of the Triforce… she seemed out of sorts. Yet not by that. Something else. Something that kept her from sleep, something she had not been telling him.

Ganondorf did not expect so, but he felt his brow furrow and his gaze sharpen, yet on her face, and the clench of her jaw. It was not a familiar sensitivity to him, not an ordinary thing to him to taste by empathy that she had been upset. Neither were the shaking thoughts that didn’t revel in it at the time.

Plainly dressed, Ganondorf did not bother with presentation as his boots thundered down stairs, crossed halls with long strides, and finally stopped before her room-- feeling so far from his own. He hesitated on the threshold. Then he remembered that he was practically the God of all Evil.

Ganondorf knocked.

“You may enter,” said Zelda, as if she was aware of exactly who shifted uncomfortably before her chamber.

Within, she was naked. Other men would have found this an imbalance of power: she vulnerable, he not. It was inverse for the Gerudo King, however, as her gaze passed down him like storm fronts along a mountain peak: exposed to a force of nature.

“We’ll pretend that I don’t know why you’re here,” she said skeptically.

“No.”

“You were spying on me,” she said.

“I thought to make love to you,” he lied. It was not entirely a lie for very long.

Ganondorf heard her laugh, and it stripped the flesh from him, and scoured his bones white and clean even as he felt his own amorous stirrings below. “Come here, then, and be kinged.”

Questions of the boy in green, the upset in her heart, words withered and suspicion grew as he drew near. This was a Zelda in anger, a Zelda that pulled his collar down until he bent double and only with the barest “May I?” sealed her lips over his. Her hips pressed close, hands running down his back, already peeling down his breeches where his erection stabbed into her thigh.

Unexpected. Sudden. Suspicious. Dangerous?

_Dangerous_ cast his cock as hard as glass.

Ganondorf tripped over the bed behind him. He hadn’t noticed he had been losing ground to her, and his trousers around his knees caused him to fumble in the sheets. Zelda smiled at him fondly, as if she only faintly felt sorry for what he was to endure. Ganondorf did not understand, until he moved to grab her breast, only to find his wrist locked firmly in place. And the other.

“You-”

“You could break free at any time you wished,” she said with the ghost of pity. “With two shares of the Triforce.”

She knew. And his eternal companion, fear, rose in excitement as Zelda leaned closer, ran her knuckles down his unshaven cheek. “But you won’t,” she said, which was true.

Ganondorf watched her spread legs astride his hips, rising pale into the room: scrutiny her servant. And with exact touch, she fitted his aching tip to where she felt slick and waiting.

“If this is about your duty to bear a child--”

Zelda’s white fingers, sharp nails closed over his throat and witchcraft silence choked the words out of him. “Nod yes to proceed.”

Ganondorf did more than nod, nearly bucking up into her; fright and frenzy mingled in a torrid blur. He winced to feel her warm around him, to hear her quiet groan as she ambitiously thrust herself upon him. Ganondorf saw her strain, though not in pain, but effort to take his girth.

He could have roared at the saintliness of her smile, before so impaled, she broke his silence with her kiss. Ganondorf could feel her lean forward with his entire body.

“Yes, continue,” said Ganondorf dryly. Zelda slapped him across the face, with the full force of her knuckles. No earthly blow could damage the King of Evil, but Ganondorf did gape in shock at her audacity, her nerve. He throbbed within her, incited by the sudden pain.

“It is unplanned, inconvenient, and unwise, Ganondorf, but as much I can be expected to, I do love you,” she said. “But that will not stop me for long.”

And with one hand braced on his broad chest, and another on her clit, she fucked him. She fucked him with the intensity of desperation, the musk of arousal and the rawness of nature, the heat of the sun. Every inch of him she took was a mile on the earth, and her curving breasts were his tossing canopy. Even as Zelda bore down harder upon him and the curtain of her hair curled upon his chest, he did not fight, but only wondered between the base nonthought of sex if this was real, _if this was how it was_ _forever, and if not, how to make it so, how deeply he’d delve her in return--_

“Please,” she moaned, her own face flushed and her pace breathless.

He intended to speak and answer her, but the noises that left his throat were not words, but snarls and gasps where his human tongue failed him. He ground his hips into her efforts, feeling her laboring fingers, knowing he was what fueled her lust and lit her clit.

“Please,” she attempted a second time, thrusting down hungrily onto his swelling cock. Her plea trailed off into frustrated silence, her face almost touching his own.

Ganondorf’s bonds shattered like sugar-glass, and he surged up to meet her in a cataclysmic kiss. His guiding hand slid down her back and brace her ass, tilted her hips. His  thumb joined her wet fingers and with a subtlety Ganondorf knew as well as breathing, Zelda was cast into bliss to cry in relief. Beyond close himself, Ganondorf released her for one final thrust to join her.

“Please,” said Zelda weakly, darkly in regret. “Forgive me.”

With her free hand where he had forgotten it, Zelda lanced him through the heart with a shock of white magic. Betrayal! Confusion! Defeat! Anger!

He came, and if he were in sounder mind, would be ashamed that it was the most powerful orgasm in his long, reincarnative life.

Anger! Regret! Sadness.

She took from his defeated body the remainder of the Triforce.

Hope. Despair.

Death.

\--

Ganondorf had experienced death so many times, he suspected that his experience of death differed from that of other beings. There was no body, yes, and thus no thought. But still, he had some sort of  self  that persisted. Sub-flesh, sub-mind, into the depths of abyssal questions: redefining what it meant to exist.

Ganondorf was much too stubborn to dissolve into ether, after all, despite the laws that bound a mortal man. Much too angry, far too much to live for.

And yet, he could find no rage in his soul. The fact mocked him, the irony that he would accept so flatly exactly what he knew Zelda would do, and for once, not fight it.

It had been nothing but a shade; nothing but some demented fancy that after hundreds of years of whispers and ugly legends, someone would praise of his name. After centuries of monstrosity, humanity. After an eon of an enemy, a lover. No, more valuable than that -- a friend.

But Zelda, he knew, was as she always had been, and always would be: like him, a cold relic and guardian of the past. He had heard sorrow in her voice, or had he imagined it? Idols did not weep.

He had believed. For only a little while. Because he had wanted to believe. Because he felt that he could make it real. As he strived with all his passions and perhaps the purest, most valorous ember in all his black heart.

But the world did not abide by his power, no matter how he sought to shape the land and the heavens.

It was at this nadir that Ganondorf did as he had always done. He denied this fact.

At his core, this may have been the kernel that the Heavens found so worthy.

Ganondorf denied the abyssal drop of death, the conclusion that all things would be as they had always been. And, as always, he clawed up to life and light with a greed in his soul so ravenous that none could deny him.

He had wanted to believe that Zelda, in this time, was all she had seemed. He still wanted to believe. For all cowardice and short-sighted thought in his heart, Ganondorf was a man that never relinquished hope-- for hope embodies the catalyst of power and change.

And, with his decision in hand, his forming mind could think, could burn in possibility. The suddenness of her advances, her repeated attempts, the great variance in her sincerity and her unnatural over-preparedness,  her warning, her doubt… the caller at her rooms and his connection to the events that occurred only minutes afterward...

Of course. What a complete fool he was to assume that--

It was at this moment that Ganondorf very inconveniently happened to return to life-- as much as this state could have been considered alive. His body lay cold, limp upon a sodden bed. His dim thoughts slogged through a haze of blood loss. Presumably from the large hole blasted in his chest.

The first syllables that passed out of from between his sluggish, corpsed lips were an ancient Gerudo obscenity. He did not know  whose  father had been tektite dung, but the curse was a satisfactory catharsis. He would perish again in minutes without assistance, and Ganondorf did not know if he would have the good fortune to return expeditiously a second time. With his sorcery and mind, he called out to any one of his many servants to assist him. Without the Triforce of Power, he found himself limited to only those he had recently contacted. Which was, for the duration he had been King in Hyrule and possessing of a polite and well-trained Hylian staff, no minions at all.

Though, he weakly considered, this was not entirely true. There were three people he had traced with magic recently, in particular. One was Zelda herself, and summoning her was even to a recently mortaled man missing more than a pint of blood, a bad idea. Next was the hero Link, and if he was the problem that Ganondorf assumed, summoning him would be unhelpful.

Ganondorf, on wild hope and blind desperation, summoned a specific bowman: the last of those Ganondorf had scryed in his viewing-glass.

The man had previously been asleep, and now stumbled around the room in confusion and fatigue, in a long nightshirt and sleeping cap and bare feet. “What…? How…?”

“That does not matter. Assist me,” Ganondorf croaked tersely. “Or else, I…”

“Din’s tits! What happened here?” the man yelped, staring in horror at the scene before him: the King of Evil, splayed out entirely naked on a bed, bleeding to death from a divot in his entire ribcage.

“Zelda,” coughed Ganondorf, abandoning his threat. He couldn’t do much, he rethought.

“What did you threaten the Queen with to cause her to do this?” said the man with an edge to his voice. Ganondorf felt faint.

“Don’t waste time,” he said. “Do… s….” That was it. His lung had collapsed, and he could no longer speak. Ganondorf felt blood welling up in the back of his throat, and fought to remain conscious.

He did not have to fight for long, for a sickly-sweet and bitter medicinal taste doused his mouth and slid down his gullet unpleasantly, and with blurred eyes Ganondorf watched as the man up-ended a flask into his throat. It was cut with strong spirits, but it was enough chu jelly to close his wounds. Ganondorf sputtered as his breath and clarity returned. His limbs still felt weak, and he was viciously thirsty, but the decisive action had saved his life.

“Look here, Monster King,” said the man. “You may be something of black magic, or you may not be. But I wasn’t taught to let a man die right in front of me if I could save him. You’re a risk, but not the first one in my life, so I damn hope you’re worth it.”

Ganondorf rubbed his hands and shivered as he sat up, still chilled in near-death. His second priority was pants. Then his third priority, the man in front of him.

“You must be… You cannot be serious,” he muttered angrily, taking in the other man’s appearance in the light of the window, the silhouette of a nightcap and long shirt. “Hear me now-- I do  not have time for the nonsense of before. What is your name?”

“I will not betray to you my family, not even now.”

“I can conjure you from anywhere you or your brood could possibly run,” said Ganondorf acidly, pulling on his own shirt. “I’m through with illusions of choice. You will tell me, now, or I will kill you.”

The man bit his lip. And then he grit his teeth. And then he opened his mouth, and spoke what Ganondorf feared most, what complicated things immensely. “My name is Link. Link of Kasuto.”

The next syllables Ganondorf uttered were also Gerudo obscenity, except this time he knew  exactly whose father he spoke of..

No. No, think, he forced himself. This was distraction, less relevant than the movement of the Triforce. He felt naked without a share of it. With it combined, Zelda, or her treacherous caller, could do anything.

He had to find it, all of it, before sunrise at the latest. He’d failed at locating even one piece when he’d held two before. He’d failed in more lifetimes than he could count.

“What are you doing?”

Ganondorf rummaged in an area of Zelda’s room she’d once implicated, however slightly. When he’d mentioned the Triforce before her, how close he was to finding it, she’d looked here. It was a juvenile trick, and he hardly expected it to be accurate. But he’d not been able to properly search her quarters with her scrutiny in play.

She’d been naked last he recalled. She would have had to dress, and then remove whatever she needed to proceed. What remained was unimportant; what was missing was what he sought.

“Hurrying up.”

Her personal desk had been disturbed, paper scattered in an uncharacteristic way for scrupulous Zelda. The cleared space was an open latch, what was a false surface, and now-revealed compartment. Beside it, a small box inlaid with gold, lacquered wood and blue silk.

Ganondorf had seen it before. He’d found it empty before. Within, the vacant space where a certain key-instrument to a certain holy door had recently rested.

“Excuse me?” said the summoned man, squinting in worry at the sound of a  third curse that hadn’t sounded on stone for a thousand years.

“You must come with me. Immediately. I have much to make clear to you, and very little time to do so,” Ganondorf grumbled, conjuring a pair of boots from off-hand memory and throwing them at this new, other Link. “Those should fit your diminutive feet.”

Link made an undignified noise, but Ganondorf did not pay it much attention. Dubiously decent and covered in different amounts of blood, between the two of them, they finally exited the bedroom, and Ganondorf began to walk quickly to his own quarters. Link jogged somewhat to keep up. Even grown, he was still a short man.

“So, what is your newest devilry, Evil One?” asked Link wryly, resigned to the danger he was in.

“Not mine. And not, as I had assumed, Zelda’s,” said Ganondorf. “The Triforce, whole, has been stolen and I suspect your friend, another Link, is to blame-- after threatening Zelda to use as his tool.”

“You know of the true Hero? The true and destined leader of free Hyrule?” said Link, almost as if he recited a party line. “His name was why I, along with at least one other Link, was told to not reveal names.”

“False,” said Ganondorf. “Your protection was never a priority. You were sacrificed or even purposefully eliminated when your master used you to send the Queen a threat, in the form your arrow. That I spared you was deviance, I assume, from what was expected.”

From what he expected for himself, he did not say.

“Your master Link came tonight to Zelda’s quarters. I assume he threatened her there again, for she had resisted or denied the message of your arrow-- the message that I now know was an order to kill me. I assume the original plan was to contrive my confusion-- and to get me in a vulnerable state, in bed, where she presumed I would be occupied, where she could assassinate me without resistance. Unfortunately for her, she did not find her hands free, or my attention lax, or both at once, until tonight. Or perhaps she gave up on her mission, and only recently was forced to take it up again.”

“Please, less detail of your private hours with a wife you do not deserve,” said Link, who looked only somewhat less green than his smock.

“If it pleases you,” said Ganondorf dryly. “I assumed, because Zelda is crafty, that she was the master of my opposition and commanded the Hero. I did not suspect that she might be the one controlled. And, because I had confronted the other Link before, I assumed he was just a boy that I tricked out of a shard of divinity. In reality, such a theft made little difference, if Zelda was planted to take all Triforce pieces away from me in time to begin with.”

He shook with rage. “And of course I could not find the last piece when I assumed she was its curator. No, he must not have trusted her with it, or she would have rebelled…”

The thought of some other being so checking  his Zelda was intolerable.

They reached Ganondorf’s door. Link could not help but stare at the room within. Aside from dungeons, it was likely the man had never seen the inside of a palace before.

“My theft was only a small setback. It wounds me that I assumed wrongly who was the master and who was the slave. It was not unbelievable that Zelda could have forged all those letters, arranged documents, and made official a marriage that never occurred on her own. But in hindsight, she obviously had assistance.”

“Assistance?” Link said as Ganondorf began to don his war armor-- something he had to collect in person, for its many pieces. “Zelda is our… is his enemy. There’s supposed to be an uprising tonight. I doubt it’s to help her any.”

“An ambush,” Ganondorf muttered, speeding the buckles and the fitting with sorcery. “Zelda is soft for her own, and would not use the power she holds on them… and this foe would not want Zelda to assemble the relic on her own terms.” he paused, eagle eyes lancing to the man by his side. “Why are you here, and not there?”

“It wasn’t my orders. I don’t have any anymore, not since the last set,” said Link, a hollowness sunken under his eyes and cast into his voice. “You’re probably right. Now that I think of it, that’s odd. But not if they guess you killed me when you caught me, because you released me in secret and all…”

“Gods, how you babble,” grunted Ganondorf, taking his best sword. “I never should have demanded you speak.”

“They plan to begin the uprising at the Temple of Time, which makes sense with your guess of what’s happening,” Link said defiantly. “If you’d conjure me a bow, I’ll come with you.”

“No. Run.”

The man was shocked. “What?”

“Steal a horse and run. Exit the city. Put as much distance between you and this place as possible.”

“Why?”

“If I fail, you are the next chance to defeat your double, and possibly the last,” Ganondorf said. He said it like a man dragging a raw wound through vinegar, dissecting the limits of his pride. “I am the master of this Land, now and forever. But I would be a fool to not remember my history of setback when faced with Heroes.”

\--

There was enough time lost to worry Ganondorf. He knew he hadn’t been dead long enough to cool, but urging the primary Link down to the stables without alarming the castle staff  of the bloodbath in two bedrooms or his own gory state took minutes he was loathe to spare. If there truly was an ambush set for her, then Ganondorf doubted Zelda would have used magic to spirit herself to the temple’s grounds; she would have been given instructions that would properly spring the trap. Which gave him time: dressing and proceeding on foot as the Queen in the early morning would not have been hasty-- and Zelda was not a woman to do anything halfway.

Ganondorf made no such preparations. After another shot of something medicinal, he tore the distance through darkness as quickly as his sorcery could propel him.

The bright light within, scattered on marble and glass windows stung his eyes. Zelda, having opened the Door of Time, collapsed on the floor. A throng of cursing men held their faces in agony, the white light of the Heavens streaming into the hall and filling it with swords. Ganondorf was not close enough to see the Queen breathe.

He ran to her, fighting how the glare bit and clawed at his face, until he knelt before a tired, shaken, bruised woman with no Triforce in her grasp. Between the altar and his great, bent form, it was was enough to shade her.

Ganondorf could hear many step back behind him. Already tracking blood, hair wild behind him, clad in enough steel to besiege a city, Ganondorf knew how he tested the weakness of their nerve. How a legion of men would gleefully ambush a lone woman, when she contained two-thirds of ultimate providence but would shrink before him when he had none! He ignored them, in their hesitation.

“I’d pay for my betrayal,” said an exhausted Zelda. “But… please, not you. Please, stay dead.”

“I defy you,” he grumbled, squinting. Her bloodless face washed out. “Which of these beat you most badly?”

“None. The one who did is gone on, ahead. These here came to block my escape. I… he let me live…”

Ganondorf bored into her eyes, and saw her recoil. “I would not have,” he said acidly, and saw her shake, close her eyes.

“He let me live, because his wish will destroy me forever.”

Ganondorf knew what she expected, for him to strike her through, twin the wound she’d left in him. Yet, his rage stirred onward, away from this woman after it counted her bruises, and forward to the one who had marked her. It was bright in his blood, defied the familiar scald of tarred, sulfurous guts. It towered over ancient grudges.

A blade drew behind him. Ganondorf merely looked over one massive armored shoulder, with one wicked eye. The shadow he cast was long. The man dropped his sword, apologized, and quickly turned around and tried to push through the reluctant crowd. It withdrew like the tide.

“We will catch him in the Temple of Light, no more time wasted,” said Ganondorf, hoisting her up. She leaned into his waist, gripping her bow and few arrows in her off hand. She did not limp, but walked shakily, pinching her brow to ward off her aches. Ganondorf steeled his gaze, trained by desert sun and blinding dunes. He resisted the urge to look at his hand, which in another life would have put her in this state. But, as he gripped her small shoulder other images of beaten women seemed fresher in his mind than in a thousand years.

“There is no “we,” I would think,” she said warily.

“Zelda. You behave as if killing me is somehow remarkable or unexpected,” Ganondorf said, even casually. “Death is a minor inconvenience. You, and victory, are worth more than its pitiful hold.”

Her speechlessness mercifully gave way to an even greater light, the center of the sun, the gate to the heavens. Ganondorf could feel something in his skin quake, shrink, poisoned and recoiling from its brilliance. But what of him was human formed a shield, and through the agony he pressed on. No Power to him, he thought, as he crossed the threshold-- yet with the presence here, Zelda… he could do anything. This was her domain. It was rare, to feel her with him as he entered where he’d been opposed. To be permitted, and not pariah.

The Temple of Light was not a place that followed the rules of flesh. By all sense it ought to have been brighter than all the heaven-rays its entrance had emitted. All was clear, silent, and the stars flowed like water. Ganondorf had been here once before.

The boy had been here before too, yet never so grotesque.

“He is the one who did all this?” Ganondorf whispered, bent into her ear. His lips twisted into a sneer, and he growled, “Hurt him.”

Zelda had already pulled away from him and had nocked her arrow. All Ganondorf did was remove his arm from her, let her free, and like a falcon her claws flew. The arrow shook the Link, but even as he turned to face the archer Ganondorf was there, sword in midswing. It cleaved him collar to stern.

He lived, He had too much divinity to die now, and laughed. Ganondorf could see something in the boy’s face here, where true forms were made plain. Fairy-light, or something else. It was possible that he was already somewhat beyond being alive.

Ganondorf ached that he’d missed it, for his presumptions.

“You can’t kill me, Evil One. Not the last time, or this time, or ever.”

Ganondorf said nothing, merely fended off the Master Sword and felt the boy’s blood splatter his gauntlets. It was already cold.

“Chosen Hero, I cannot allow you to proceed,” said Zelda, and it was an eerie dream to hear her by his side, instead of across the field. “You’ll destroy far more than you think.”

“The only thing I’ll destroy is you,” said the Link. “And your divine providence. The only thing I will destroy is slavery to your destiny, and I will deliver Hyrule to those who truly have souls born of it.”

“Don’t speak to him,” said Ganondorf, “I invented what he’s doing.”

The Triforce could only unite when the bearers relinquished each piece. The boy would die without Power and Courage to sustain him and nullify his wounds. To stall attack would provide an opening to grasp Wisdom which was so close nearby… and by making it whole receive one wish.

Ganondorf could not not guess how terrible that wish might be.

Mortal aches shook his bones, each risky cut from the Master Sword was undulled. With Power, _his_ Power, this foe was tireless. With Courage, this foe was indomitable. Ganondorf wasn’t to be denied, and redoubled his effort, his rage, his odd empowerment to have the deadly Zelda as an ally, into holding his ground firmly between the Link and Wisdom where it sat. The Queen herself buried arrow after arrow into the Link’s back, and when she was out of shots, fired bolts of pure Light that weaponized the heavens itself.

The boy became keen to this, and soon began to roll out of the way, leap and manipulate to lead Ganondorf into the path of Zelda’s volley. She too became more clever, and angled her shots off the mirror-like surfaces and brilliant sky-iron of the Temple to catch him by surprise.

It was not enough. Ganondorf felt his parries slowing as fatigue took its toll, felt his bulk weigh him down. He was tired. Of this, of many things. Of how even when he was the defender, this Hero was the end.

Ganondorf heard the whistle long before he saw the arrow. It was the whistle of a truly powerful bow, a truly stout arrowhead. a point wrought of pure silver, shaft of yew, fletched with red eagle feathers. It was an arrow he knew well, heard well-- the slaying arrow, bane of all beasts-- but had never before seen it bite into any skin but his.

The foe staggered, coughed. Then, sank to his knees. Then, overcome, was defeated. Divinity relinquished, with a single, terrible shot. Across the Sacred Realm, the mortal Link, Link the archer of Kasuto, lowered his long bow.

Ganondorf knew well, and was reminded then that while the Wielder of Power was substance and change, while the Wielder of Wisdom was the law and time, the Wielder of Courage was Life and Secrets… the greatest of which was death. How to avert it, and how to deal it.

And suddenly, before him, was the Triforce. Ganondorf had already touched it, it was a reflex he could not resist, something etched into his flesh. He could feel it shudder, and he knew it found him impure, and would break.

He could feel the eyes on him, of the man who had hated him, and the woman who had loved him, and felt the weight of choice for the first time.

_“And what would you do if you did find the Triforce? Do this, except with somewhat more gold?”_

Zelda, again, became a fixture in his mind. But one now he feared to break, even while her watch fell like a gargoyle on his judgement.

_“What would you do with it?”_

_“Rule this kingdom.”_

_“You already do. Why do you need it?”_

_“It’s not the same.”_

_“How?”_

The Triforce stretched thin, its patience dwindling. The merciless archer now, he was here too, and his expectations were less full of skin,  but just as raw-edged.

_“Hit me harder, monster. Fill the hide you were fashioned in.”_

Nothing, thought Ganondorf. Panic, shame, disappointment that he had no better demand, thoughts of obtaining godhood or divine Providence himself only an instance after his first, sealing wish. He spat and cursed, but as the Temple of Light receded, and he felt the Triforce scatter to proper owners to rest, spent… he fell quiet.

Zelda, Link, they looked at him. Zelda mouthed something under her breath, prayers and mercy and thank-you, perhaps for his decision. Link was struck.

“That’s all. That’s really it? You, supposed to bring about the end of the world, and that’s it? Nothing?”

Ganondorf felt his cuts and wounds, felt the still-healing ache in his ribcage, but also felt Zelda lean on him in exhaustion as well. He could examine her properly now. She had a black eye and where her side could be seen down the neck of her dress, it was purple. He moved his hand where it would have crushed the tender wound.

He breathed in the dusty air in the now-abandoned temple, the air of his kingdom’s holiest place.

“For now, I have what I desire,” he said, and the sureness surprised even himself.


End file.
